Press Releases

17 June 1997: On this photo, two major astronomical instruments equipped with state of the art infrared array detectors are seen undergoing final integration and testing at the Assembly Laboratory at the ESO Headquarters (Garching, Germany) prior to being shipped to the ESO observatories in Chile. It was obtained a few days after a visit to this laboratory by the ESO Council at the time of its June 1997 meeting in Garching.

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.

11 March 1997: An international team of astronomers has used large telescopes in Chile and Australia to measure the biggest star in the sky. The star, designated R Doradus , is of the so-called red giant type and is located in the southern constellation of Dorado. Its apparent diameter (i.e., the size which the star appears to have when seen from the Earth) is larger than any other so far observed, except for the Sun. In particular, it exceeds by more than 30% that of Betelgeuse , which for the past 75 years has held the title of star with the largest apparent size.

28 February 1997: This week astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have tested a novel approach of doing astronomy from the ground. Inaugurating a new era, the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla successfully performed a series of observations under automatic control by advanced computer software developed by the ESO Data Management Division (DMD) for use with the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). This move has been made necessary by technological improvements in telescopes and the increasing competition among scientists for these valuable resources.

15 January 1997: Recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have documented an unexpected and rapid, seven-fold brightening of an unusual double star at the centre of the impressive 47 Tucanae globular cluster in the southern sky. This is the first HST observation of such a rare phenomenon. The astronomers [1] who are involved in this observational program find that this event cannot be explained by any of the common processes known to occur in such stars.

14 August 1996: ISAAC (Infrared Spectrograph And Array Camera) will be the first major instrument to be installed at VLT Unit Telescope no. 1; according to the current planning, this will happen by mid-1998. ESO Press Photo eso9635a shows this complex instrument during the present, thorough technical tests in the Infrared Laboratory at the ESO Headquarters in Garching (Germany).

2 August 1996: The past four centuries have seen dramatic improvements in astronomical equipment, in terms of better and larger telescopes, more accurate and sensitive detectors and, not the least, by advanced space instruments with access to new spectral regions. However, until recently there has been little progress on another equally important front, that of quantifying the unavoidable influence of this equipment on the astronomical data they produce. For a long time, astronomers have desired to remove efficiently these `instrumental effects' from their data, in order to give them a clearer understanding of the objects in the Universe and their properties. But it is only now that this fundamental problem can finally be tackled efficiently, with the advent of digital imaging techniques and powerful computers.

20 November 1995: Today, forty 16-18 year old students and their teachers are concluding a one-week, educational `working visit' to the ESO Headquarters in Garching (See ESO Press Release 14/95 of 8 November 1995). They are the winners of the Europe-wide contest `Europe Towards the Stars', organised by ESO with the support of the European Union, under the auspices of the Third European Week for Scientific and Technological Culture.

15 September 1995: Four European astronomers [1] have taken advantage of the superb imaging quality of the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) at the La Silla observatory, to detect a galaxy at an extremely large distance. They conclude that its redshift [2] is z = 4.4; thus, this galaxy is by far the most remote ever detected. In fact, it has taken its light about 90 percent of the age of the Universe to reach us, and we now observe this early object as it appeared, only 1 - 2 billion years [3] after the Universe was created in the Big Bang. Still, the galaxy contains a considerable amount of elements that must have been produced in stars. This proves that stars were formed in normal galaxies, already before this very early epoch.

18 February 1994: Eight years after the passage of Comet Halley in early 1986, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have succeeded in obtaining an image [1] of this famous object at a distance of no less than 2,820 million km from the Sun. The comet is now about as far away as giant planet Uranus. It recently passed the halfway mark towards the most distant point of its very elongated 76-year orbit. The image shows the 6 x 15 km avocado-shaped nucleus as an extremely faint point of light without any surrounding dust cloud. It appears that the surface is now completely frozen and the comet has ceased to emit dust and gas. This observation was made with the ESO 3.58 metre New Technology Telescope (NTT). It is by far the faintest and most distant image ever recorded of this comet.

3 June 1993: The recent identification of the optical image of a pulsar in the Large Magellanic Cloud is a fine illustration of astronomy as a high-tech international science. It is the first extragalactic pulsar to be so identified and only the third radio pulsar, after those in the Crab and Vela nebulae in the Milky Way, for which this has been possible.

3 June 1993: Although astronomy is an exact natural science, chance sometimes plays an important role. The recent discovery during an otherwise routine observation of the hitherto brightest known double quasar [1] would not have been possible without some luck.

7 May 1992: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has revealed an unusual and fascinating new optical jet in the nucleus of the elliptical galaxy NGC 3862.

5 February 1992: The ESO 16-metre equivalent Very Large Telescope (VLT) [1] will be equipped with technologically advanced instruments that record the light collected by the large mirrors.

17 January 1991: Acting on information received from Danish scientists working with an X-ray telescope on a Soviet satellite, astronomers at the ESO La SiIla observatory in Chile have discovered a strange new star in the southern constellation of Musca (the Fly). Preliminary observations with the ESO 3.5-m New Technology Telescope indicate that the object is a nova, most probably a small, very dense star in a binary system whose brightness in a dramatic event has suddenly increased about 1000 times. The available optical and X-ray observations point to a quite unusual object.

23 March 1989: Early this morning, and during superb atmospheric conditions, the 3.5 m ESO New Technology Telescope (NTT) produced its first astronomical images. They completely satisfy the high expectations towards this revolutionary high-tech telescope, the first of its kind in the world. This important milestone was passed less than seven years after the start of the NTT project in 1982 and at the end of a four-year construction phase (various aspects of the New Technology Telescope have been described in eso8801 and eso8805).

8 July 1988: A unique picture of Comet Halley has just been obtained by three astronomers with a telescope at the ESO La Silla observatory. An exposure time of almost 12 hours was necessary to show the structure of the famous comet in some detail at the present, very large distance of 1250 million kilometres.