Press Releases

1 August 2002: A team of European astronomers [2] have observed eight Brown Dwarfs, i.e., small and faint objects also known as "failed stars", with the TIMMI2 infrared sensitive instrument at the ESO 3.6-m telescope on La Silla. From two of these, mid-infrared radiation is detected - for the first time ever from such objects with a ground-based telescope . While the younger Brown Dwarf, aged a few million years, is found to be surrounded by a dusty disk, no warm dust is present around the older ones. The new observations support the following formation hypothesis for Brown Dwarfs: they are born in the same way as "real" stars, by contraction in interstellar clouds of gas and dust . During the later stages of this process, the infalling material is transferred onto the star via a gas and dust disk . This disk - in which planets may possibly form - then disperses with time.

20 December 2001: Through imaging at infrared wavelengths, evidence has been found for recent star formation in the so-called "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier 16), made famous when the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST) obtained spectacular visible-wavelength images of this object in 1995. Those huge pillars of gas and dust are being sculpted and illuminated by bright and powerful high-mass stars in the nearby NGC 6611 young stellar cluster. The Hubble astronomers suggested that perhaps even younger stars were forming inside. Using the ISAAC instrument on the VLT 8.2-metre ANTU telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory, European astronomers have now made a wide-field infrared image of the Messier 16 region with excellent spatial resolution, enabling them to penetrate the obscuring dust and search for light from newly born stars.

7 June 2001: An international team of astronomers [2] is announcing today the discovery of dusty disks surrounding numerous very faint objects that are believed to be recently formed Brown Dwarfs in the Orion Nebula [3]. This finding is based on detailed observations with SOFI, a specialised infrared-sensitive instrument at the ESO 3.5-m New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory. It is of special interest because it sheds light on the origin and nature of substellar objects, known as "Brown Dwarfs". In particular, these results suggest that Brown Dwarfs share a common origin with stars and that Brown Dwarfs are more similar in nature to stars than to planets and, like stars, have the potential to form with accompanying systems of planets. Moreover, the presence of dusty protoplanetary disks around the faintest objects in the Orion Nebula cluster confirms both the membership of these faint stars in the cluster and their nature as bona-fide substellar objects, making this the largest population of Brown Dwarf objects yet known.

30 March 2001: A new astronomical instrument, TIMMI2, has just been installed on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla. The first images have just been obtained and hold great promise for future research programmes with this facility. The Thermal Infrared MultiMode Instrument was built in a collaboration between ESO and a consortium headed by the Jena University Observatory (Germany). It detects infrared radiation in the 5-24 µm mid-IR spectral region. It is particularly well suited for observations of the complex processes that take place in the innermost regions of star-forming clouds. It is also a forerunner of a similar, but even more powerful instrument to be installed at the 8.2-metre VLT telescopes on Paranal during the next years. Among the first images are some of the most penetrating, mid-infrared views ever obtained of the central region of the Orion Nebula.