Announcements

15 June 2011: The ESO Annual Report 2010 is now available. It presents the many activities of the European Southern Observatory throughout the last year, covering topics including: ESO’s research highlights, with the latest results from the fields of exoplanet detection, the study of massive stars, and the history of star formation. An overview of the activities of ESO’s telescopes. A description of the status of the astronomical instruments at the La Silla and Paranal observatories, detailing new installations and upgrades. The progress of the exciting ALMA and E-ELT projects.

15 June 2011: With a decision by ESO Council to endorse a revised baseline design for the E-ELT, ESO is one step closer to starting construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) on 3060-metre-high Cerro Armazones near ESO’s Very Large Telescope site in Chile. After the successful E-ELT Design Review in September 2010 and with Brazil joining ESO (eso1050), the E-ELT project is now not only technically ready to enter the construction phase, but is also backed by a solid funding scenario.Between the end of 2010 and the summer 2011, the E-ELT project extended the detailed design phase in order to consider the recommendations of the E-ELT Design Review. The main goals were the reduction of risk by optimising the cost and constraining the schedule to make sure that ESO can further expand its leading role in astronomy by constructing the world’s first extremely large telescope.In June 2011, the ESO Council endorsed ...

6 June 2011: On the nights of 15–17 May 2011, astronomers successfully applied a new observing technique on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). The new procedure is called “blind observation mode” and will allow interferometric observations to be made of targets significantly fainter than before. It has already produced detailed observations of the spectrum of a quasar, 10 times fainter than the best currently known results. The result was obtained by combining the light from three of the VLT’s 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes in the AMBER [1] beam combiner. The ground-breaking technique, developed by a team of astronomers led by Romain Petrov from the Laboratoire Fizeau (Université de Nice, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur and CNRS, France), allows them to observe targets that would ordinarily be far too faint to be detected by an interferometer. They do this by first observing a bright star near the faint target, which allows them to calibrate ...

3 June 2011: On 3 June 2011 in Prague, an agreement was signed committing Czechia to provide its full share of the additional financial contribution required for construction of the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). The agreement was signed by the Director of the Department of International Cooperation in Research and Development of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of Czechia, Dr Jan Marek — authorised by the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports, Josef Dobeš — and the ESO Director General, Prof. Tim de Zeeuw. The contribution will be made in two equal instalments, in 2012 and 2014, subject to approval of E-ELT construction by the ESO Council, which is currently planned to occur in December of this year. This agreement will help ESO keep its leadership in the field of ground-based astronomy. “This agreement is an important step on the road to building the E-ELT, which will be the largest ...

20 May 2011: A special event has been held in London on 19 May 2011, at which officials from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) briefed UK companies on what they need to do to get involved in the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) project. Around 60 UK businesses attended the event. As with companies from the other ESO Member States, British companies are being urged to bid for a share of a billion Euros that will be available in contracts for the E-ELT, which will be the biggest optical and infrared telescope in the world. The E-ELT will be a 42 metre telescope that will be a revolutionary tool in astronomy. Among other goals, it will have the task of tracking down Earth-like planets, capable of harbouring life, that orbit distant stars. Building the E-ELT will take more than just its state-of-the-art optics. The telescope is a major civil engineering project and will ...

28 April 2011: Three unique and remarkably perfect toric mirrors, which are a vital component for SPHERE, a new instrument at the VLT, have been successfully completed and tested. SPHERE is one of the second generation of VLT instruments and it will search for giant Jupiter-sized exoplanets orbiting nearby stars, using direct imaging. The mirrors were manufactured for SPHERE at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille (LAM) in France. The mirrors are called toric because their surfaces have slightly different curvatures in different directions — like the surface of a large torus, or doughnut. Directly detecting exoplanets is one of the most exciting areas of modern astronomy, but it is also undoubtedly one of the most challenging. Sometimes likened to trying to spot a firefly against the overwhelming light of the Moon; the enormous contrast in brightness between the host star and the orbiting planets means that an extraordinarily sensitive and precise instrument is ...

27 April 2011: By studying some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, an international team of astronomers led by Cristina Chiappini [1] has used data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope to show that the first massive stars in the Universe were probably very fast rotators, which they have dubbed spinstars. Their findings will be published in an article in Nature on 28 April 2011. Massive stars live fast and die young, so the first generation of massive stars in the Universe is already dead. However, their chemical imprint, left behind like an incriminating fingerprint, can still be found today in the oldest stars in the Milky Way. These fossil records provide valuable clues about the mysterious first stellar generation to enrich the pristine early Universe. Soon after the Big Bang, the Universe was made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. It was only enriched with other elements around 300 million years later ...

20 April 2011: On 17 March 2011 light collected by all four of the 8-metre Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope was successfully combined for the first time using PIONIER [1], a new generation instrument in the VLT Interferometer. To have all four Unit Telescopes (UTs) finally working together as a single telescope is a major step in the development of the VLT — the original design always anticipated that the four 8-metre telescopes would be able to work either independently or together as part of the giant VLT Interferometer (VLTI). Coincidentally, the new observations took place on the 10th anniversary of the first successful combination of two beams within the VLTI. Among the main science goals for the four UTs, working together with PIONIER, are to try to reveal the signatures of planets in the making, to explore the natures and fates of stars by providing images of their surfaces and ...

20 April 2011: The HISTORY TV channel network will broadcast a series of short films in Latin America featuring ESO telescopes. Viewers will have the chance to win a trip to ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile and admire the southern skies from one of the best observing sites in the world. Starting today, and continuing until June, the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes will be presented every day on screen by HISTORY Latin America and HISTORY Brazil, letting up to 32 million households share the excitement and mystery of the Universe. Viewers will have the chance to participate in a special contest. Four lucky winners will get the once-in-a-lifetime experience of spending a night at the Paranal Observatory, and experiencing the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory for themselves. To participate, viewers must register on the competition’s website.To celebrate the fifth season of the documentary series “The Universe” currently being aired by ...

5 April 2011: The European Southern Observatory (ESO) operates some of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world. Building and maintaining such grand instruments requires external help, and ESO has forged many strong working relationships with industry to secure the necessary technical expertise. Since 2005, ESO has awarded contracts worldwide totalling more than 600 million euros, the vast majority of which have been placed with companies in the ESO Member States and Chile. You can find out more about ESO’s relationship with industry, as well as the opportunities that are available for the ESO Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), for which construction is due to begin by the end of this year, in the new printed flyer, ESO and Industry. To download a copy of the flyer, please go to http://www.eso.org/public/products/flyers/flyer_0008/

4 April 2011: A prestigious worldwide photography exhibition called The World At Night (TWAN) — One People, One Sky will open to the public for one month from 8 April 2011, at Casas de Lo Matta cultural centre in Santiago, Chile [1]. The European Southern Observatory (ESO) produced a dedicated version for Chile of this non-profit exhibition, as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. The exhibition has been touring around the country, and it is now returning to the capital city. It features a collection of stunning photographs of the world’s most beautiful and historic sites, set against a backdrop of stars, planets and celestial events. The TWAN photographs were taken by some of the world’s best night-sky photographers. ESO Photo Ambassador Stéphane Guisard contributed several outstanding images that were taken in Chile, such as The Milky Way over the Atacama Desert, Sunset at Paranal and Moon, Planets and Santiago. Furthermore, ...

14 March 2011: Deutsche Version unten On 14 April 2011, ESO will participate in Germany’s nationwide Girls’ Day activities, in which technical enterprises, universities and research organisations arrange open days for girls, to give female school students an insight into science and technology professions and to encourage more of them to choose such careers in the future. The ESO Girls’ Day, An Introduction to the Work of the European Southern Observatory, presents a series of talks in German and question-and-answer sessions with ESO staff and students. The topics covered include astronomy and engineering, administration and human resources. To complete this introduction to the world’s most productive astronomical observatory, there will be a live video-link to Cerro Paranal, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The Girls’ Day visitors will be able to talk with an ESO astronomer working 11 000 km away on this 2600-metre mountaintop in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Places are limited for ...

26 January 2011: The ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made its first observations that combine super-sharp imaging with measurements of motion. New pioneering data from the VLTI/AMBER instrument not only show extremely fine details of the gas and dust disc surrounding the brilliant supergiant star HD 62623, but also, by using spectroscopy, reveal the motions of the material in the disc for the first time. The origin of this disc has been a mystery, as such a bright star, which is near to the end of its life, is expected to blow away the material surrounding it, and not to be surrounded by a dusty disc similar to those around very young stars. A team of astronomers led by Florentin Millour (Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Nice) has now found that the material is orbiting the star — just as the planets in the Solar System orbit the Sun. Surprisingly they ...

8 December 2010: Click here for a special seasonal greeting from everyone at the European Southern Observatory! This year has heralded many new discoveries, facilitated by the ESO telescopes, including the thought-provoking find of a distant planetary system that resembles the Solar System. Using the HARPS spectrograph attached to ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla in Chile, astronomers detected up to seven planets in orbit around a Sun-like star (eso1035). And an unusual interloper — an exoplanet that entered the Milky Way from another galaxy — was found by a European team of astronomers using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla (eso1045). In 2010 astronomers went far beyond just discovering such distant worlds. Amongst many new findings, astronomers used ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile, to detect the first spectrum of an exoplanet (eso1002) directly and to analyse, for the first time, the atmosphere of ...

7 December 2010: National Geographic has acquired the rights for Das Auge 3D (The Eye 3D), the first three-dimensional documentary produced in Germany [1]. The film will be broadcast on SKY 3D on 9 December at 20:15 (local time) in 3D television and again during the same evening at 21:10 (local time) on the German National Geographic Channel in 2D, bringing the story of the most powerful visible-light telescope in the world, ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), directly into people’s homes. The Eye 3D — Life and Research at Cerro Paranal stars ESOcast host Dr J, aka Joe Liske, who takes viewers on an exciting tour, introducing the magnificent telescope itself and the advanced techniques in use at Paranal, as well as taking a look at the daily life of astronomers, engineers, physicists and technicians working at the ESO sites. The documentary has recently won several awards, including the Gold Award in the ...

2 December 2010: Forget about painstakingly printing out and filling in order forms, you can now buy our entire range of fantastic ESO products with the click of a button [1]. The non-profit online ESOshop [2] offers a quick, easy and secure way to purchase merchandise — everything from books and posters about ESO’s telescopes and observational targets, to caps and lapel pins branded with the organisation’s official logo. With the holidays just around the corner, the ESOshop is the perfect place to browse for gifts for all astronomy enthusiasts. To visit the store, go to: http://www.eso.org/public/shop/ Educators and bona fide members of the press can order products for free from this website: http://www.eso.org/public/shop/freeorder/ One copy of each of ESO’s brochures, reports and educational materials (excluding posters, books and DVDs) can also be picked up in person for free at ESO’s Headquarters in Garching, Germany. Notes [1] Payment must be made by credit ...

2 December 2010: The Universe contains a dark secret: most of the matter, whose presence is revealed by its gravitational effect, does not emit or absorb any light. Today, we have good reasons to assume this “dark matter” is made of a new type of elementary particle that interacts only very weakly with the light and with ordinary matter. For the past 25 years, we have explored different strategies to bring light into this darkness, and to elucidate the physical nature of dark matter. During the next Café & Kosmos, Dr. Georg Raffelt (Max-Planck Institute for Physics) will explain the justifications for the existence of dark matter, mention candidates from particle physics, and discuss possible strategies to search experimentally for dark matter. The Café & Kosmos series of discussions is organised jointly by ESO, the Excellence Cluster Universe and the Max-Planck Institutes for Physics, Astrophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics. The discussions take place on ...

23 November 2010: An international team of astronomers has used ESO telescopes and other facilities to discover and study a unique and exotic star system comprised of a very cool, methane-rich (or T-) dwarf star and a “dead” white dwarf star in orbit around each other. The system is a “Rosetta Stone” for T-dwarf stars, giving scientists a way of finding the mass and age of this old methane dwarf. The team, led by Dr Avril Day-Jones of the Universidad de Chile and composed of astronomers from the University of Hertfordshire (UK), and the University of Montreal (Canada), is publishing its results in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The system is the first of its type to be found. Methane is a fragile molecule destroyed at warmer temperatures, so is only seen in very cool stars and giant planets like Jupiter. Neither giant planets nor T-dwarf stars are massive ...

4 November 2010: Light coming from the four 1.8-metre Auxiliary Telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) based in Paranal, Chile, has been successfully combined for the first time using a new visiting instrument called PIONIER [1]. This is an important step towards unleashing the full potential of the VLTI to use multiple telescopes together to reveal fine detail in distant objects. A joint team from Grenoble LAOG [2] and ESO achieved this very challenging feat of engineering only five days after unpacking the equipment on the mountain. The VLTI engineers had to control the distance traversed by the light from the widely separated telescopes with an accuracy of about one hundredth of the thickness of a strand of human hair. Once the light reached PIONIER, it was then channelled into the heart of the instrument: a remarkable optical circuit [3], smaller than a credit card, that finally brought ...

28 October 2010: On Thursday 4 November 2010, ESO’s powerful telescopes, which are located in a remote and barren desert landscape in Chile, will become more accessible than ever to astronomers in Europe, thanks to a new high-speed data link. Members of the press are invited to attend the launch of the new communications data link and to view a demonstration of the technology from the project site in the middle of the Atacama Desert. The high-speed data link is part of the Enabling Virtual Access to Latin American Southern Observatories (EVALSO) project. Previously, data from instruments at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) were sent back via a microwave link to a base station near the Chilean city of Antofagasta and from there to Santiago. This link supports a data transfer rate of only 16Mbit/s, but, since ESO’s VISTA telescope saw first light in December 2009, the Paranal Observatory now produces over 100 ...