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22 de Octubre de 2010: Un evento extraordinario tendrá lugar el miércoles 27 de octubre de 2010, cuando uno de los autos eléctricos más avanzados que se hayan construido, el auto deportivo SRZero, realice una parada en el Very Large Telescope (VLT) del Observatorio Europeo Austral (ESO) en Cerro Paranal, Chile. La prensa está invitada a presenciar este interesante encuentro de tecnologías de punta que representan el ingenio que ha llevado a la humanidad hasta el límite de lo posible, tanto en nuestro planeta como fuera de él. La actividad de prensa comenzará con el ingreso al Observatorio Paranal a las 16:00 horas, para continuar con una completa sesión fotográfica y de video, visita a los telescopios, entrevistas con ingenieros y astrónomos destacados, y una fascinante puesta de Sol alrededor de las 20:00 horas. Los periodistas interesados en obtener su acreditación deben contactar a Gonzalo Argandoña antes del evento, en la Oficina de ESO en ...

21 de Octubre de 2010: An international team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope has measured the distance to the most remote galaxy known so far. This is the first time that scientists have been able to confirm that they are observing a galaxy as it was in the era of reionisation — when the first generation of brilliant stars stripped out the opaque hydrogen fog filling the young Universe, thus making it transparent and ending the cosmic Dark Ages. In the latest ESOcast host Dr J explains how the historic observations were made, and the science that can be learned from them. The ESOcast is available in multiple formats, including HD. Episodes can also be watched or downloaded directly from iTunes.

20 de Octubre de 2010: “El cielo en nuestras manos” es una nueva actividad educacional ofrecida por el Observatorio público Cruz del Sur, un popular destino turístico cerca de Combarbalá, en la Región de Coquimbo en Chile. La actividad, que está dirigida a estudiantes de educación primaria, consiste en un nuevo video titulado Laura Estrella, así como materiales impresos y modelos en papel para trabajos prácticos. En el video, una pequeña niña llamada Laura sueña con un viaje al espacio en donde –guiada por su madre- descubre algunos secretos del Universo, desde el movimiento de los planetas hasta la forma de nuestra propia galaxia, la Vía Láctea. El proyecto también incluye el desarrollo de ejercicios y juegos prácticos, los que están disponibles en la página web del Observatorio Cruz del Sur. “El cielo en nuestras manos” fue apoyado y financiado por el Observatorio Europeo Austral (ESO), a través del Comité Mixto ESO-Gobierno de Chile 2009. ...

18 de Octubre de 2010: A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope and its powerful instrumentation to push the study of the earliest galaxies further than ever before. An online press conference to announce the new results and offer journalists the opportunity for discussion with the scientists will be held at 16:00 CEST on Tuesday, 19 October 2010. To participate in the teleconference and receive additional material under embargo, bona-fide members of the media must get accredited by contacting Douglas Pierce-Price by email (dpiercep@eso.org). Reporters will need access to a computer with a recent version of Adobe Flash Player installed and a decent internet connection. Further information will be provided to the accredited reporters.

15 de Octubre de 2010: This special issue of Communicating Astronomy with the Public journal (CAPjournal) looks at IYA2009 events that focused on cultural astronomy and discusses how including a historical or cultural aspect can help communicators to engage with a wider audience. During IYA2009, many countries ran projects that can be classed as “Cultural Astronomy”. The activities described focused on indigenous astronomy, the history of astronomy and the inclusive nature of astronomy — as a hobby that can be enjoyed by anyone, anywhere. Activities included public events that combined telescope observing with storytelling, new learning modules for school children, theatre productions and cultural astronomy exhibitions. Articles in this issue include “Australian Aboriginal Astronomy in the IYA2009”, “Mi’kmaq Night Sky Stories”, “Making Astronomy Culturally Relevant” and many more. It is hoped that the selection of events presented in CAPjournal 9 will encourage others to highlight the cultural aspect of astronomy in their own education and ...

13 de Octubre de 2010: Astronomers have used the ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT) and other ground-based telescopes, in conjunction with the ESA spacecraft Rosetta to study a very strange celestial object that resembles a highly unusual comet tail. Using the new observations they could reconstruct the sequence of events, and concluded that, in the first half of February 2009, a small rock with a diameter of only a few meters smashed into the asteroid P/2010 A2. This high-speed collision created the trail of dust that was discovered as the bizarre “comet”. The result is also confirmed by independent results from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. To work out the history of this unique event, Colin Snodgrass (Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and ESO) and collaborators have combined images from ground and space, including those taken from a very different position by the Rosetta probe, which is currently far out in the Solar ...

10 de Octubre de 2010: A new study has confirmed that galaxies like the Milky Way form easily. The investigation, carried out by Kambiz Fathi at the Institute of Astronomy of Stockholm University, also shows that Milky-Way-sized galaxies have been the biggest spiral galaxies for at least the last 3.4 billion years of the Universe’s 13.7-billion-year history. To come to his conclusions, Fathi measured images of 30 000 galaxies, using the facilities of the European Virtual Observatory (EURO-VO) [1]. ESO is a co-leader of the EURO-VO Facility Centre. Virtual Observatories allow astronomers to use the power of the internet and large databases to re-use and combine existing observations from many different telescopes in innovative ways. For each of the 30 000 galaxies, he estimated the number of stars in the parts of galaxies where spiral arms are prominent, using images from the Sloan Digitized Sky Survey telescope [2]. The Sun occupies just such a place ...

8 de Octubre de 2010: The latest issue of Science in School, a free science education journal, is now available. The many exciting stories in this issue cover topics such as marine conservation, car racing in the physics classroom, flying doctors, and hot stuff in the deep sea. Science in School is published by EIROforum, a collaboration between seven European intergovernmental scientific research organisations, of which ESO is a member. The journal addresses science teaching both across Europe and across disciplines: highlighting the best in teaching and cutting-edge research.

7 de Octubre de 2010: Astronomers have used the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), in conjunction with other telescopes, adaptive optics technology and an advanced computer program, to accurately predict the size and shape of an asteroid 200 million km from Earth. As the asteroid, (21) Lutetia, is only 100 km across, the challenging Earth-based observations were equivalent to trying to measure the size and shape of a large baked potato at a distance of about 200 km. Each of the approximately 300 snapshots shows the asteroid as little more than a small blob, but by combining all of them, together with further measurements of the brightness of the asteroid over time, the team were able to reconstruct a three-dimensional model of Lutetia. Following this, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft took high-resolution photographs of Lutetia during a fly-by in July 2010. The images show convincingly that the ground-based observations correctly predicted both the size and shape of ...

5 de Octubre de 2010: ESO boasts many talented astrophotographers among its employees and collaborators, the finest of whom have been rewarded for their dedication by being designated official ESO Photo Ambassadors. These devoted individuals take awe-inspiring images of the night sky from ESO sites in Chile, using their photographic skills to remind us all of the beauty of the night sky. Backed with official ESO support, this team ensure that we can all — regardless of where we live — see the exquisite southern night sky in its full and untainted glory. Selected photographs from the Photo Ambassadors are regularly released as ESO Pictures of the Week, via the ESO Twitter feed and Facebook page, and as slideshows on the group’s web page. Current Photo Ambassadors include Yuri Beletsky, Stéphane Guisard, Gerhard Hüdepohl, José Francisco Salgado and Serge Brunier. If you are an ESO employee or collaborator and think you have what it takes ...

4 de Octubre de 2010: l Observatorio Europeo Austral (ESO) se complace en presentar Tesoros Escondidos, un concurso gratuito para todos aquellos que disfrutan obteniendo hermosas imágenes del cielo nocturno usando datos astronómicos reales. Esta competencia ofrece premios tremendamente atractivos para los afortunados ganadores que produzcan las imágenes más hermosas y orginales, incluyendo un viaje con todo pagado al Very Large Telescope de ESO en Cerro Paranal, en Chile, el telescopio óptico más avanzado del mundo. El ganador tendrá además la oportunidad de participar en las observaciones nocturnas del VLT bajo los secos cielos chilenos. El trabajo, sin embargo, es sólo para perseverantes, ya que se encuentran disponibles varios terabytes de datos, que abarcan varios años, diferentes instrumentos y tecnologías. La meta es extraer un set de datos del archivo científico de ESO, procesar los marcos en bruto y ensamblarlos para formar una hermosa imagen en color o en blanco y negro. ¿Te atreves a ...

1 de Octubre de 2010: Today, the third — and best — version of the popular ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator image-processing software has been released with several significant improvements. As with the previous versions of the FITS Liberator, the new version makes another leap towards making the creation of colour images from raw astronomical observations easier and faster. The FITS Liberator continues to support the FITS and PDS formats, preferred by astronomers and planetary scientists respectively, which enables data to be processed from a wide range of telescopes and planetary probes, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA’s XMM–Newton Telescope and Cassini–Huygens or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The new FITS Liberator incorporates a faster and more streamlined workflow. The CPU-intensive calculations have been optimised, thanks to significantly improved memory management, and this allows for time savings of up to 35%. For large images the savings in efficiency are even ...

30 de Septiembre de 2010: Several Postdoctoral Fellowships will soon be awarded at ESO Germany and Chile. These Fellowships will offer young and bright scientists opportunities and facilities to enhance their science research projects at the most productive observatory in the world. ESO is presently operating the VLT and La Silla Telescopes and APEX, is the European partner in the ALMA project, and is designing the E-ELT, the largest optical-infrared telescope in the world. The ESO Fellowship Programme is a competitive one: don’t miss the deadline on 15 October!

30 de Septiembre de 2010: The next Café & Kosmos discussion evening will take place on 4 October 2010. It will deal with the question of the scale of the Universe. We will start with familiar scales: the Sun has a diameter of about 1 million kilometres. But it is only one of about 100 billion stars in our Milky Way, which stretches over a distance of 100 000 light-years. And our home galaxy is just one of many! During the Café & Kosmos evening, astrophysicist Dr. Wolfram Freudling, from ESO, will discuss large-scale structures in the Universe, where galaxies and galaxy clusters cling like drops of dew on a giant, three-dimensional spider’s web. But how can astronomers discover and measure these structures? These and other questions will be answered in the light of frontline scientific research. The Café & Kosmos series of discussions is organised jointly by ESO, the Excellence Cluster Universe and the ...

27 de Septiembre de 2010: Today’s telescopes study the sky across the electromagnetic spectrum. Each part of the spectrum tells us different things about the Universe, giving us more pieces of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. The most powerful telescopes on the ground and in space have joined forces over the last decade in a unique observing campaign, known as the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or GOODS, which reaches across the spectrum and deep back into cosmic time. In a very special “multicast” video podcast, the ESOcast has joined forces with the Hubblecast, the Spitzer Space Telescope’s “Hidden Universe”, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s “Beautiful Universe” podcasts. Here we explore the collaboration of these great observatories on the GOODS project.

22 de Septiembre de 2010: ESO acaba de publicar la edición 141 de su revista trimestral, The Messenger. Esta edición presenta una serie de artículos, entre los que destacan los siguientes: La diferencia entre seeing y calidad de la imagen Un nuevo coronógrafo para NACO Vapor de agua sobre Paranal y La Silla Usando APEX y VISTA para rastrear la Vía Láctea Estudiando galaxias distantes con el Rastreo de Galaxias Distantes de ESO ESO en el Simposio SPIE sobre Telescopios e Instrumentación Astronómicos Además incluye otros artículos como ‘solárgrafos’ en los observatorios de ESO – una inusual forma de aprovechar la calidad de cielos de Chile.

17 de Septiembre de 2010: The movie Eyes on the Skies – 400 Years of Telescopic Discovery, initiated as part of the International Year of Astronomy 2009, has received the International Association for Media in Science’s Award at the TechFilm 2010 Festival. The award ceremony took place on 16 September 2010 at the National Technical Library in Prague. The International Year of Astronomy 2009 marked 400 years since Galileo Galilei first looked at the sky through a telescope, and Eyes on the Skies explores the many facets of the instrument that changed our view of the world we live in — its historical development, the scientific importance, the technological breakthroughs, and also the people behind it with their triumphs and failures. The Eyes on the Skies movie is presented by Dr J, aka Dr. Joe Liske from ESO, host of the Hubblecast and the ESOcast video podcasts. The DVD runs for 60 minutes and includes ...

9 de Septiembre de 2010: Using data from observations by two amateur astronomers (Anthony Wesley from Australia and Christopher Go from the Philippines), as well as data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and several other ground-based telescopes, scientists have found that the object seen entering the atmosphere of Jupiter on 3 June 2010 was a meteoroid roughly 8–13 m in diameter. The science paper is available on this link. This was the second of three recently observed Jupiter impacts discovered by amateurs, with the latest being reported on 20 August 2010 by the Japanese amateur astronomer Masayuki Tachikawa and confirmed by other Japanese amateurs. The video of that event can be watched at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIkr86xKcwQ ESO’s VLT has also been used to study the aftermath of the first and very spectacular unexpected Jupiter impact that was also first spotted by Anthony Wesley on 19 July 2009. By using the VISIR instrument Leigh Fletcher and his collaborators ...

9 de Septiembre de 2010: New research carried out using ESO telescopes has, for the first time, allowed astronomers to reconstruct a detailed picture of the inner disc of matter around a young star. Stéphanie Renard of the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Grenoble and colleagues used the ESO VLT Interferometer to probe the secrets of the star HD 163296. Young stars are surrounded by discs of dust and gas and scientists believe that it is in these discs that planets are born. Dusty grains in the disc stick to each other to make larger lumps that in turn also aggregate together. This growth is expected to continue until rocky bodies about the size of the Earth are formed. “The power of the VLT Interferometer to probe very fine details now allows us to see the inner region very close to the star where there is not expected to be any dust. The new images reveal the ...

7 de Septiembre de 2010: Las personas que viven en la Región de Antofagasta, en Chile, pueden enviar sus propias respuestas a la gran pregunta “¿Qué tan grande es el Universo?”. La respuesta más original y rigurosa desde el punto de vista científico ganará una noche de estadía en Cerro Paranal, el hogar del VLT, el observatorio óptico-infrarrojo más avanzado del mundo. Nanoantofagasta es una innovadora competencia de video organizada por el Centro de Divulgación de la Astronomía Paranal UCN, en colaboración con Explora-Conicyt, el Ferrocarril de Antofagasta y el Observatorio Europeo Austral. Los participantes deben enviar un video creativo explicando qué tan grande es el Universo, con una duración máxima de dos minutos. Cualquier formato de video está permitido, incluidas las webcams y las cámaras de celulares. Sólo los residentes de la Región de Antofagasta en Chile pueden optar al premio.