From ESO: ESOcast 57

ESO celebrates 15 years of the VLT in this wonderful new video. Enjoy.

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Paranal Platform The VLT

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ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

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From ESO: “ESO’s Very Large Telescope Celebrates 15 Years of Success”

Contacts

23 May 2013
Richard Hook
ESO, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

“With this new view of a spectacular stellar nursery ESO is celebrating 15 years of the Very Large Telescope — the world’s most advanced optical instrument. This picture reveals thick clumps of dust silhouetted against the pink glowing gas cloud known to astronomers as IC 2944. These opaque blobs resemble drops of ink floating in a strawberry cocktail, their whimsical shapes sculpted by powerful radiation coming from the nearby brilliant young stars.

This new picture celebrates an important anniversary for the Very Large Telescope – it is fifteen years since the first light on the first of its four Unit Telescopes, on 25 May 1998. Since then the four original giant telescopes have been joined by the four small Auxiliary Telescopes that form part of the VLT Interferometer (VLTI). The VLT is one of the most powerful and productive ground-based astronomical facilities in existence. In 2012 more than 600 refereed scientific papers based on data from the VLT and VLTI were published (ann13009).

Interferometer

Interstellar clouds of dust and gas are the nurseries where new stars are born and grow. The new picture shows one of them, IC 2944, which appears as the softly glowing pink background. This image is the sharpest view of the object ever taken from the ground. The cloud lies about 6500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). This part of the sky is home to many other similar nebulae that are scrutinised by astronomers to study the mechanisms of star formation.

Emission nebulae like IC 2944 are composed mostly of hydrogen gas that glows in a distinctive shade of red, due to the intense radiation from the many brilliant newborn stars. Clearly revealed against this bright backdrop are mysterious dark clots of opaque dust, cold clouds known as Bok globules. They are named after the Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok, who first drew attention to them in the 1940s as possible sites of star formation. This particular set is nicknamed the Thackeray Globules.

See the full article complete with notes here.

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From ESO: “Einstein Was Right — So Far”

Record-breaking pulsar takes tests of general relativity into new territory

“Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope, along with radio telescopes around the world, to find and study a bizarre stellar pair consisting of the most massive neutron star confirmed so far, orbited by a white dwarf star. This strange new binary allows tests of Einstein’s theory of gravity — general relativity — in ways that were not possible up to now. So far the new observations exactly agree with the predictions from general relativity and are inconsistent with some alternative theories. The results will appear in the journal Science on 26 April 2013.

An international team has discovered an exotic double object that consists of a tiny, but unusually heavy neutron star that spins 25 times each second, orbited every two and a half hours by a white dwarf star. The neutron star is a pulsar that is giving off radio waves that can be picked up on Earth by radio telescopes. Although this unusual pair is very interesting in its own right it is also a unique laboratory for testing the limits of physical theories.

This pulsar is named PSR J0348+0432 and is the remains of a supernova explosion. It is twice as heavy as the Sun, but just 20 kilometres across. The gravity at its surface is more than 300 billion times stronger than that on Earth and at its centre every sugar-cubed-sized volume has more than one billion tonnes of matter squeezed into it. Its companion white dwarf star is only slightly less exotic; it is the glowing remains of a much lighter star that has lost its atmosphere and is slowly cooling.

‘I was observing the system with ESO’s Very Large Telescope, looking for changes in the light emitted from the white dwarf caused by its motion around the pulsar,’ says John Antoniadis, a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn and lead author of the paper. ‘A quick on-the-spot analysis made me realise that the pulsar was quite a heavyweight. It is twice the mass of the Sun, making it the most massive neutron star that we know of and also an excellent laboratory for fundamental physics.’

This work made use of data from the Effelsberg, Arecibo and Green Bank radio telescopes as well as the ESO Very Large Telescope and the William Herschel Telescope optical telescopes.”

Contacts

John Antoniadis
Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie
Bonn, Germany
Tel: +49-228-525-181
Email: jantoniadis@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de

Michael Kramer
Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie
Bonn, Germany
Tel: +49-228-525-278
Email: mkramer@mpifr-bonn.mpg.de

Richard Hook
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

See the full article here.

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Paranal Platform The VLT

NTT – New Technology Telescope

La Silla

ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

ESO, European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.

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From ESO: “A Ghostly Green Bubble”

ESO’s VLT snaps a planetary nebula

10 April 2013
Richard Hook
ESO, La Silla, Paranal, E-ELT & Survey Telescopes Press Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

“This intriguing new picture from ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows the glowing green planetary nebula IC 1295 surrounding a dim and dying star located about 3300 light-years away in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). This is the most detailed picture of this object ever taken.

Stars the size of the Sun end their lives as tiny and faint white dwarf stars. But as they make the final transition into retirement their atmospheres are blown away into space. For a few tens of thousands of years they are surrounded by the spectacular and colourful glowing clouds of ionised gas known as planetary nebulae.

This new image from the VLT shows the planetary nebula IC 1295, which lies in the constellation of Scutum (The Shield). It has the unusual feature of being surrounded by multiple shells that make it resemble a micro-organism seen under a microscope, with many layers corresponding to the membranes of a cell.

These bubbles are made out of gas that used to be the star’s atmosphere. This gas has been expelled by unstable fusion reactions in the star’s core that generated sudden releases of energy, like huge thermonuclear belches. The gas is bathed in strong ultraviolet radiation from the aging star, which makes the gas glow. Different chemical elements glow with different colours and the ghostly green shade that is prominent in IC 1295 comes from ionised oxygen.”

Extra added attraction

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VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

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From ESO- “ESO Flashback: HAWK-I infrared image of the spectacular barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365

“This striking image, taken with the powerful HAWK-I infrared camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory in Chile, shows NGC 1365. This beautiful barred spiral galaxy is part of the Fornax cluster of galaxies, and lies about 60 million light-years from Earth. The picture was created from images taken through Y, J, H and K filters and the exposure times were 4, 4, 7 and 12 minutes respectively.”

NGC1365

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ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

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From NASA Chandra- “NGC 3115: Chandra Images Gas Flowing Toward Black Hole”

NASA Chandra

“The galaxy NGC 3115 contains a supermassive black hole at its center. New Chandra data has been used to clearly image hot gas as it falls toward this giant black hole. This is the first time that clear evidence for such a flow has been observed in any black hole. Astronomers observed a critical threshold known as the ‘Bondi radius’ using Chandra.

Composite

X-ray

Optical

Credit X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alabama/K.Wong et al, Optical: ESO/VLT
Release Date July 27, 2011
Observation Date 3 pointings between June 14, 2001 and Jan 29, 2011
Observation Time 43 hours 6 min (1 day 19 hours 6 min)

The galaxy NGC 3115 is shown here in a composite image of data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Using the Chandra image, the flow of hot gas toward the supermassive black hole in the center of this galaxy has been imaged. This is the first time that clear evidence for such a flow has been observed in any black hole.

The Chandra data are shown in blue and the optical data from the VLT are colored gold. The point sources in the X-ray image are mostly binary stars containing gas that is being pulled from a star to a stellar-mass black hole or a neutron star. The inset features the central portion of the Chandra image, with the black hole located in the middle. No point source is seen at the position of the black hole, but instead a plateau of X-ray emission coming from both hot gas and the combined X-ray emission from unresolved binary stars is found.

NGC 3115 is located about 32 million light years from Earth and is classified as a so-called lenticular galaxy because it contains a disk and a central bulge of stars, but without a detectable spiral pattern.

See thye full article here.

Chandra X-ray Center, Operated for NASA by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

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From ESO: “Huge Map of the Distant Universe Reaches Halfway Point”

12 March 2013

VLT survey charts positions of 55,000 galaxies

“The largest project ever undertaken to map out the Universe in three dimensions using ESO telescopes has reached the halfway stage. An international team of astronomers has used the VIMOS instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope to measure the distances to 55000 galaxies as part of the VIPERS survey . This has already allowed them to create a remarkable three-dimensional view of how galaxies were distributed in space in the younger Universe. This reveals the complex web of the large-scale structure of the Universe in great detail.

Vimos

By studying the cosmic web astronomers can test theories of how the Universe formed and evolved and help to track down the properties of the mysterious dark energy that is making the expansion of the Universe speed up. By mapping how large-scale structure grows with time they can also check whether Einstein’s theory of general relativity holds precisely, or whether it may need to be revised.

The light of each galaxy is spread out into its component colours within VIMOS. Subsequent careful analysis then allows astronomers to work out how fast the galaxy appears to move away from us — its redshift. This in turn reveals its distance and, when combined with its position on the sky, its location in the Universe.”

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Paranal Platform The VLT

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La Silla

ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

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From ESO: “New Hardware to Take Interferometry to the Next Level”

Star separator delivery complete

1 March 2013

“ESO has just taken delivery of the last of a series of sophisticated optical and mechanical systems called star separators for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). These systems from the Dutch research institute TNO will allow the VLTI’s future instruments to observe much fainter objects than is possible at present.

A bright star is needed as a reference so the VLTI can correct for the constantly changing atmospheric conditions and remain precisely adjusted to extremely high precision. Currently this bright star must also be the target of the observations, limiting the type of object that astronomers can study with the VLTI. But the new star separator technology allows two objects to be observed together: a bright star to track the atmosphere and a faint target to be studied. The corrections from the bright object are applied to the fainter one.

Thanks to this development the reach of VLTI, using the future PRIMA and GRAVITY instruments, will be greatly extended. Objects up to two hundred times fainter than can at present be studied will become accessible. This will allow the VLTI to explore the material around supermassive black holes at the centre of the Milky Way and also in other galaxies. It also offers the potential to study giant planets around nearby stars and measure the positions of objects to far higher accuracy than is possible at present.

PRIMA “Future Looks Bright for Interferometry”, ESO 2008

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Paranal Platform The VLT

NTT – New Technology Telescope

La Silla

ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

ESO, European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.

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From ESO: “The Birth of a Giant Planet?”

Candidate protoplanet spotted inside its stellar womb

“Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have obtained what is likely the first direct observation of a forming planet still embedded in a thick disc of gas and dust. If confirmed, this discovery will greatly improve our understanding of how planets form and allow astronomers to test the current theories against an observable target.“

An international team led by Sascha Quanz (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) has studied the disc of gas and dust that surrounds the young star HD 100546, a relatively nearby neighbour located 335 light-years from Earth. They were surprised to find what seems to be a planet in the process of being formed, still embedded in the disc of material around the young star. The candidate planet would be a gas giant similar to Jupiter.

‘So far, planet formation has mostly been a topic tackled by computer simulations,’ says Sascha Quanz. ‘If our discovery is indeed a forming planet, then for the first time scientists will be able to study the planet formation process and the interaction of a forming planet and its natal environment empirically at a very early stage.’

HD 100546 is a well-studied object, and it has already been suggested that a giant planet orbits about six times further from the star than the Earth is from the Sun. The newly found planet candidate is located in the outer regions of the system, about ten times further out.

The planet candidate around HD 100546 was detected as a faint blob located in the circumstellar disc revealed thanks to the NACO adaptive optics instrument on ESO’s VLT, combined with pioneering data analysis techniques. The observations were made using a special coronagraph in NACO, which operates at near-infrared wavelengths and suppresses the brilliant light coming from the star at the location of the protoplanet candidate.”

Contacts

Sascha P. Quanz
ETH Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland
Tel: +41 (0) 44 63 32830
Email: sascha.quanz@astro.phys.ethz.ch

Julien H. Girard
ESO
Santiago, Chile
Tel: +56 2 2463 5342
Email: jgirard@eso.org

Richard Hook
ESO, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

See the full article here.

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THE BASIC TOOLS OF E.S.O.

Paranal Platform The VLT

NTT – New Technology Telescope

La Silla

ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

ESO, European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.

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From ESO: “New Laser Improves VLT’s Capabilities”

21 February 2013

“A new and more powerful laser has successfully completed testing at ESO’s Paranal Observatory and has been formally accepted today. This new laser source is called PARLA and forms a vital part of the Laser Guide Star Facility (LGSF) at ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT).

The laser is used to generate an artificial star about 90 kilometres up in the atmosphere [1]. By creating and observing such a bright point of light astronomers can probe the turbulence in the layers of the atmosphere above the telescope. This information is then used to adjust deformable mirrors in real time in order to correct most of the disturbances caused by the constant movement of atmosphere and create much sharper images.

The new laser will greatly improve the reliability and flexibility in operating the LGSF [laser guided star facility]. It uses similar technology to that which will also be employed in the four lasers of the future Adaptive Optics Facility currently under development at ESO. The new laser delivers up to 7 Watts of output and is very stable.

Notes

[1] An artificial star is created where the laser interacts with the 10-kilometre thick layer of neutral sodium atoms in the mesosphere causing them to fluoresce. Atomic sodium has an optical transition at a wavelength of 589 nanometres. The laser parameters are tuned to efficiently excite this atom.”

Contacts

Steffan Lewis

ESO
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6931
Email: slewis@eso.org

Frederic Gonte
ESO, Paranal Observatory
Chile
Tel: +56 55 43 5248
Email: fgonte@eso.org

Richard Hook
ESO, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

See the full article here.

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THE BASIC TOOLS OF E.S.O.

Paranal Platform The VLT

NTT – New Technology Telescope

La Silla

ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

ESO, European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.

ScienceSprings is powered by MAINGEAR computers