Press Releases

2 May 2013: The Danish 1.54-metre telescope located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has captured a striking image of NGC 6559, an object that showcases the anarchy that reigns when stars form inside an interstellar cloud.

2 March 2001: Globular clusters are very massive assemblies of stars. More than 100 are known in the Milky Way galaxy and most of them harbour several million stars. They are very dense - at their centers, the typical distance between individual stars is comparable to the size of the Solar System, or 100 to 1000 times closer than the corresponding distances between stars in the solar neighborhood. Globular clusters are among the oldest objects known , with estimated ages of 11 to 15 billion years [1]. All stars in a globular cluster were formed at nearly the same moment, and from the same parent cloud of gas and dust. The original chemical composition of all stars is therefore the same. But now, an international group of astronomers [2], working with the UVES Spectrograph at the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), have obtained some unexpected results during a detailed analysis of dwarf stars in some globular clusters . Such stars have about the same mass as our Sun and like it, they evolve very slowly. Thus they still ought to have about the same abundances of most chemical elements.

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.

12 August 1998: A new comet was discovered on August 10 by amateur astronomer Peter Williams of Heathcote (near Sydney, Australia). Having received information about this, other observers on that continent sighted the new object yesterday, August 11.

23 December 1996: This series of four images shows the appearance of Comet Hale Bopp in early November 1996. At this time it was approaching the Sun in the sky, and these images are some of the last made by a major astronomical telescope in 1996. They were made by Hermann Boehnhardt of the Astronomical Institute of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich (Germany).

20 September 1996: This heavily processed image of C/1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) is based on a CCD frame that was obtained on August 18, 1996, by Nick Thomas (Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie, Germany) and Heike Rauer (Observatoire de Paris, France), observing with the DFOSC multi-mode instrument on the Danish 1.54-m telescope at La Silla. The frame was taken at 04:20 UT through an R filter (to show the dust around the cometary nucleus) and the integration time was 20 s.

16 September 1996: On August 7, 1996, Eric W. Elst (Royal Observatory, Uccle, Belgium) reported his discovery of a cometary image on mid-July exposures by Guido Pizarro with the 1.0-m ESO Schmidt telescope at the La Silla Observatory. Further ESO Schmidt plates were then obtained, and on August 19, with the help of orbital computations by Brian Marsden (IAU Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, Cambridge, Mass., USA), Elst was able to identify the object on them. Even though the orbit (Period = 5.6 years; inclination = 1.4 deg; eccentricity = 0.17) is entirely characteristic of that of a main-belt minor planet with the implied long-term orbital stability, the continued presence of a tail seemingly confirms the object as a 'comet'. The object now carries the designation 'Comet P/1996 N2 (Elst-Pizarro)'.

4 March 1996: Spectra of Comet Hyakutake were obtained at the ESO La Silla Observatory on February 29.3 UT by Klaus Simon (Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Munich, Germany) and Chris Lidman (ESO-Chile). They used the Danish 1.54-m telescope with the multi-mode DFOSC instrument and a large CCD. The slit was centred on the brightest part of the cometary coma. The frames were reduced by S. Benetti (ESO-Chile).

2 March 1996: These false-colour images are reproductions from a short-exposure CCD frame, obtained with the Danish 1.54-metre telescope and the DFOSC instrument with a 2052 x 2052 pix Loral/Lesser CCD. They show the innermost coma of Comet Hyakutake and the pronounced asymmetry of the dust distribution around the nucleus.

21 February 1996: During the first weeks following its discovery on January 31, 1996, Comet C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake) has gradually brightened from magnitude 11-12 to 8. As it moves nearer to the Sun and is headed for a close approach to the Earth in late March 1996, the observers continue to describe it as diffuse, with a central condensation, but no typical comet tails were seen so far.

11 February 1996: These false-colour photos show the first images of comet C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake), obtained with the DFOSC instrument at the Danish 1.54-metre telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory. This comet is expected to become quite bright when it passes near the Earth in late March 1996.

1 September 1995: A new image of comet Hale-Bopp, taken at ESO's observatory in La Silla, sheds new light on the structure of this peculiar comet.