Press Releases

3 December 2001: A team of astronomers and engineers from French and German research institutes and ESO at the Paranal Observatory is celebrating the successful accomplishment of "First Light" for the NAOS-CONICA Adaptive Optics facility. With this event, another important milestone for the Very Large Telescope (VLT) project has been passed.

8 October 2001: A series of very detailed images of a binary system of two young stars have been combined into a movie. In merely 3 days, the stars swing around each other. As seen from the earth, they pass in front of each other twice during a full revolution, producing eclipses during which their combined brightness diminishes. A careful analysis of the orbital motions has now made it possible to deduce the masses of the two dancing stars. Both turn out to be about as heavy as our Sun. But while the Sun is about 4500 million years old, these two stars are still in their infancy.

7 June 2001: Impressive thermal-infrared images have been obtained of the giant planet Jupiter during tests of a new detector in the ISAAC instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory (Chile). They show in particular the full extent of the northern auroral ring and part of the southern aurora. A volcanic eruption was also imaged on Io, the very active inner Jovian moon. Although these observations are of an experimental nature, they demonstrate a great potential for regular monitoring of the Jovian magnetosphere by ground-based telescopes together with space-based facilities. They also provide the added benefit of direct comparison with the terrestrial magnetosphere.

13 October 2000: The following Press Release, now retracted, is kept on the web for information and historical reference.

26 October 1999: The La Silla Observatory is located in the Chilean Atacama Desert, one of the driest and loneliest areas of the world. The land around this isolated peak was acquired in 1964 and following some years of construction work, the inauguration of ESO's first observatory took place just over 30 years ago, in March 1969. The solitude of this remote desert site is well illustrated by the above panorama, obtained in 1996.

11 June 1997: This new and very detailed image of the famous circumstellar disk around the southern star Beta Pictoris was obtained with the ESO ADONIS adaptive optics system at the 3.6-m telescope and the Observatoire de Grenoble coronograph. It shows (in false colours) the scattered light at wavelength 1.25 micron (J band) and is one of the best images of this interesting feature obtained so far.

9 April 1997: Circumstellar disks of gas and dust play a crucial role in the formation of stars and planets. Until now, high-resolution images of such disks around young stars within the Orion Nebula obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) constituted the most direct proof of their existence. Now, another circumstellar disk has been detected around a star in the Lagoon Nebula - also known as Messier 8 (M8) , a giant complex of interstellar gas and dust with many young stars in the southern constellation of Sagittarius and four times more distant than the Orion Nebula. The observations were carried out by an international team of scientists led by Bringfried Stecklum (Thüringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany) [1] who used telescopes located at the ESO La Silla observatory and also observations from the HST archive. These new results are paving the road towards exciting research programmes on star formation which will become possible with the ESO Very Large Telescope.

19 January 1996: How many moons has Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system? Until recently, the best answer was eighteen, ranging from innermost Pan that circles the planet 75,000 km above the cloud tops in a little less than 14 hours, to distant Phoebe, 13 million km away in a reverse ('retrograde') 550-day orbit [1]. Now the situation is less clear.

23 October 1995: Adaptive Optics (AO) is the new "wonder-weapon" in ground-based astronomy. By means of advanced electro-optical devices at their telescopes, astronomers are now able to ``neutralize'' the image-smearing turbulence of the terrestrial atmosphere (seen by the unaided eye as the twinkling of stars) so that much sharper images can be obtained than before. In practice, this is done with computer-controlled, flexible mirrors which refocus the blurred images up to 100 times per second, i.e. at a rate that is faster than the changes in the atmospheric turbulence.

25 August 1995: A very unusual comet was discovered last month, on its way from the outer reaches of the solar system towards the Sun. Although it is still situated beyond the orbit of Jupiter, it is so bright that it can be observed in even small telescopes. It has been named `Hale-Bopp' after the discoverers and is already of great interest to cometary astronomers.