Announcements 2024

14 March 2024: The construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert has reached a new milestone: a team at ESO’s Paranal Observatory have added a reflective, shiny layer, as well as special sensors, to the first segments of the telescope’s primary mirror. This “coating” means the segments are now essentially ready to start observing the skies, once installed at the heart of the world’s largest optical telescope later this decade. The 39-metre primary mirror of ESO’s ELT, known as M1, will be by far the largest mirror ever made for a telescope. Too large to be made from a single piece of glass, it will consist of 798 glass-ceramic hexagonal segments, each about five centimetres thick and 1.5 metres across. The mirror segments are manufactured in Europe in a multi-step, multinational process. The first 18 made their way across the ocean to Paranal earlier this year, and coating ...

28 February 2024: For the seventh year in a row, observations conducted at ESO’s observatories have led to more than 1000 scientific publications in a year. Recently, the ESO Library, Documentation, and Information Services Department has updated their detailed statistics on publications using ESO data, presenting each facility's contributions in 2023 [1]. The most significant contributions to these publications come from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) at Paranal Observatory, which yielded data included in over 600 studies. Highlights include the detection of distant gas clouds with leftovers from the first stars in the Universe and the most distant fast radio burst to date. For the last four years, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) has been the most productive VLT instrument, producing data for over 200 papers in 2023 alone. Also located at Paranal Observatory, the Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and the VLT Survey Telescope ...

15 February 2024: Delegations representing 102 countries agreed last week to discuss the impact of large satellite constellations on astronomy at a meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS). After intense discussions, COPUOS’ Scientific and Technical Subcommittee has agreed to add an agenda item for the next five years with the title: "Dark and Quiet Skies, astronomy and large constellations: addressing emerging issues and challenges". As the UN’s top body for space-related matters, the committee deals with all topics related to international cooperation and the exploration of space and planetary bodies, including the deployment of satellites, space debris mitigation, long-term sustainability of space and the use of orbital slots. The proposal championed by ESO’s partner and host state Chile and ESO’s member state Spain — both countries hosting significant international astronomy infrastructure — was informed by the astronomy community and received widespread support from many ...

29 January 2024: Astronomers have, for the first time, made a direct measurement of the mass of a distant black hole, one so far away that light from its surroundings took 11 billion years to reach us. The team, led by Taro Shimizu at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, found the black hole, called J0920, to have a mass of about 320 million times that of the Sun. This achievement, described in a paper published today in Nature, has been made possible thanks to GRAVITY+, a series of ongoing upgrades to ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and its GRAVITY instrument. To directly measure the mass of a black hole, astronomers use telescopes to track the movement of gas and stars around it. The faster these move, the more mass is encased within the material’s orbit. This technique has been used to measure the mass of nearby black holes, ...

16 January 2024: After a 10 000 km journey across the world, the first mirror segments of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) have safely arrived in their next home, the ELT Technical Facility at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. A total of 18 segments (out of 798) of the telescope’s main mirror (M1) successfully made the trip from Europe to South America, first arriving in Chile at the Antofagasta Terminal International (ATI) port last week. Once complete, the ELT’s M1 will be over 39 metres across, making it the world’s largest eye on the sky. Such scale means that the mirror can’t be cast in one piece, thus, 798 hexagonal segments will work together to form M1. An additional 133 will be produced to facilitate the segments’ recoating. Embarking on a remarkable voyage that began near Poitiers, France, where the ELT segments were finished, they then traveled by road to ...

10 January 2024: This week, the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Robbert Dijkgraaf, visited ESO facilities in Chile at La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. While visiting for the official inauguration of the BlackGEM telescopes, a Dutch-Belgian project hosted by ESO at its La Silla Observatory, Minister Dijkgraaf took the opportunity of being in Chile to tour all of ESO’s observing sites. At Paranal Observatory, he was also able to visit the nearby construction site of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. During his visit, Minister Dijkgraaf was welcomed by ESO’s Director General Xavier Barcons. He was accompanied by a high-level delegation, including Mirjam Lieshout-Vijverberg, Vice President and representative for the Netherlands on the ESO Council, and Amina Helmi, also a representative for the country on the ESO Council. The official inauguration of BlackGEM at La Silla also included the participation of the Dutch and Belgian ambassadors to Chile and BlackGEM’s project leader Paul ...