Persberichten

22 maart 2005: Super star clusters are groups of hundreds of thousands of very young stars packed into an unbelievably small volume. They represent the most extreme environments in which stars and planets can form. Until now, super star clusters were only known to exist very far away, mostly in pairs or groups of interacting galaxies. Now, however, a team of European astronomers [1] have used ESO's telescopes to uncover such a monster object within our own Galaxy, the Milky Way, almost, but not quite, in our own backyard! The newly found massive structure is hidden behind a large cloud of dust and gas and this is why it took so long to unveil its true nature. It is known as "Westerlund 1" and is a thousand times closer than any other super star cluster known so far. It is close enough that astronomers may now probe its structure in some detail. Westerlund 1 contains hundreds of very massive stars, some shining with a brilliance of almost one million suns and some two-thousand times larger than the Sun (as large as the orbit of Saturn)! Indeed, if the Sun were located at the heart of this remarkable cluster, our sky would be full of hundreds of stars as bright as the full Moon. Westerlund 1 is a most unique natural laboratory for the study of extreme stellar physics, helping astronomers to find out how the most massive stars in our Galaxy live and die. From their observations, the astronomers conclude that this extreme cluster most probably contains no less than 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, and all of its stars are located within a region less than 6 light-years across. Westerlund 1 thus appears to be the most massive compact young cluster yet identified in the Milky Way Galaxy.

15 maart 2005: On the basis of stellar spectra totalling more than 200 hours of effective exposure time with the 8.2-m VLT Kueyen telescope at Paranal (Chile), a team of astronomers [1] has made a surprising discovery about the stars in the giant southern globular cluster Omega Centauri. It has been known for some time that, contrary to other clusters of this type, this stellar cluster harbours two different populations of stars that still burn hydrogen in their centres. One population, accounting for one quarter of its stars, is bluer than the other. Using the FLAMES multi-object spectrograph that is particularly well suited to this kind of work, the astronomers found that the bluer stars contain more heavy elements than those of the redder population. This was exactly opposite to the expectation and they are led to the conclusion that the bluer stars have an overabundance of the light element helium of more than 50%. They are in fact the most helium rich stars ever found. But why is this so? The team suggests that this puzzle may be explained in the following way. First, a great burst of star formation took place during which all the stars of the red population were produced. As other normal stars, these stars transformed their hydrogen into helium by nuclear burning. Some of them, with masses of 10-12 times the mass of the Sun, soon thereafter exploded as supernovae, thereby enriching the interstellar medium in the globular cluster with helium. Next, the blue population stars formed from this helium-rich medium. This unexpected discovery provides important new insights into the way stars may form in larger stellar systems.

14 maart 2005: The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at Paranal Observatory has just seen another extension of its already impressive capabilities by combining interferometrically the light from two relocatable 1.8-m Auxiliary Telescopes. Following the installation of the first Auxiliary Telescope (AT) in January 2004, the second AT arrived at the VLT platform by the end of 2004. Shortly thereafter, during the night of February 2 to 3, 2005, the two high-tech telescopes teamed up and quickly succeeded in performing interferometric observations. This achievement heralds an era of new scientific discoveries. Both Auxiliary Telescopes will be offered from October 1, 2005 to the community of astronomers for routine observations, together with the MIDI instrument. By the end of 2006, Paranal will be home to four operational ATs that may be placed at 30 different positions and thus be combined in a very large number of ways ("baselines"). This will enable the VLTI to operate with enormous flexibility and, in particular, to obtain extremely detailed (sharp) images of celestial objects - ultimately with a resolution that corresponds to detecting an astronaut on the Moon.

3 maart 2005: An international team of astronomers have accurately determined the radius and mass of the smallest core-burning star known until now. The observations were performed in March 2004 with the FLAMES multi-fibre spectrograph on the 8.2-m VLT Kueyen telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory (Chile). They are part of a large programme aimed at measuring accurate radial velocities for sixty stars for which a temporary brightness "dip" has been detected during the OGLE survey. The astronomers find that the dip seen in the light curve of the star known as OGLE-TR-122 is caused by a very small stellar companion, eclipsing this solar-like star once every 7.3 days. This companion is 96 times heavier than planet Jupiter but only 16% larger. It is the first time that direct observations demonstrate that stars less massive than 1/10th of the solar mass are of nearly the same size as giant planets. This fact will obviously have to be taken into account during the current search for transiting exoplanets. In addition, the observations with the Very Large Telescope have led to the discovery of seven new eclipsing binaries, that harbour stars with masses below one-third the mass of the Sun, a real bonanza for the astronomers.

2 maart 2005: Combining observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, astronomers have discovered the most distant, very massive structure in the Universe known so far. It is a remote cluster of galaxies that is found to weigh as much as several thousand galaxies like our own Milky Way and is located no less than 9,000 million light-years away. The VLT images reveal that it contains reddish and elliptical, i.e. old, galaxies. Interestingly, the cluster itself appears to be in a very advanced state of development. It must therefore have formed when the Universe was less than one third of its present age. The discovery of such a complex and mature structure so early in the history of the Universe is highly surprising. Indeed, until recently it would even have been deemed impossible.

24 februari 2005: On January 14, 2005, the ESA Huygens probe arrived at Saturn's largest satellite, Titan. After a faultless descent through the dense atmosphere, it touched down on the icy surface of this strange world from where it continued to transmit precious data back to the Earth.

21 februari 2005: On February 1, 2005, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has merged its two observatories, La Silla and Paranal, into one. This move will help Europe's prime organisation for astronomy to better manage its many and diverse projects by deploying available resources more efficiently where and when they are needed. The merged observatory will be known as the La Silla Paranal Observatory.

19 januari 2005: Thanks to the powerful new high-contrast camera installed at the Very Large Telescope, photos have been obtained of a low-mass companion very close to a star. This has allowed astronomers to measure directly the mass of a young, very low mass object for the first time. The object, more than 100 times fainter than its host star, is still 93 times as massive as Jupiter. And it appears to be almost twice as heavy as theory predicts it to be. This discovery therefore suggests that, due to errors in the models, astronomers may have overestimated the number of young "brown dwarfs" and "free floating" extrasolar planets.

13 januari 2005: Most present-day large galaxies are spirals, presenting a disc surrounding a central bulge. Famous examples are our own Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy. When and how did these spiral galaxies form? Why do a great majority of them present a massive central bulge? An international team of astronomers [1] presents new convincing answers to these fundamental questions. For this, they rely on an extensive dataset of observations of galaxies taken with several space- and ground-based telescopes. In particular, they used over a two-year period, several instruments on ESO's Very Large Telescope. Among others, their observations reveal that roughly half of the present-day stars were formed in the period between 8,000 million and 4,000 million years ago, mostly in episodic burst of intense star formation occurring in Luminous Infrared Galaxies. From this and other evidence, the astronomers devised an innovative scenario, dubbed the "spiral rebuilding". They claim that most present-day spiral galaxies are the results of one or several merger events. If confirmed, this new scenario could revolutionise the way astronomers think galaxies formed.

12 januari 2005: Last year proved again a wonderful one for astronomy in general and for ESO in particular. Certainly the most important astronomical event for a large public was the unique Transit of Venus: on June 8, 2004, Venus - the Earth's sister planet - passed in front of the Sun. This rare event - the last one occurred in 1882 - attracted the attention of millions of people all over the world.

23 december 2004: A Happy New Year!

22 december 2004: On December 9-10, 2004, the ESO Paranal Observatory was honoured with an overnight visit by His Excellency the President of the Republic of Chile, Ricardo Lagos and his wife, Mrs. Luisa Duran de Lagos. The high guests were welcomed by the ESO Director General, Dr. Catherine Cesarsky, ESO's representative in Chile, Mr. Daniel Hofstadt, and Prof. Maria Teresa Ruiz, Head of the Astronomy Department at the Universidad de Chile, as well as numerous ESO staff members working at the VLT site. The visit was characterised as private, and the President spent a considerable time in pleasant company with the Paranal staff, talking with and getting explanations from everybody.

10 december 2004: The Tarantula Nebula is one of the most impressive views in the Southern sky. Visible to the unaided eye in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way that is located in the direction of the southern constellation Doradus at a distance of about 170,000 light-years, this huge nebula is the prototype of what astronomers refer to as a "Giant HII region". In this complex of glowing gas and very hot and luminous stars, the gas is mainly composed of protons and electrons, which are kept apart by energetic photons emitted by the stars in this area.

1 december 2004: Images of beautiful galaxies, and in particular of spiral brethren of our own Milky Way, leaves no-one unmoved. It is difficult indeed to resist the charm of these impressive grand structures. Astronomers at Paranal Observatory used the versatile VIMOS instrument on the Very Large Telescope to photograph two magnificent examples of such "island universes", both of which are seen in a southern constellation with an animal name. But more significantly, both galaxies harboured a particular type of supernova, the explosion of a massive star during a late and fatal evolutionary stage.

24 november 2004: One of the currently hottest astrophysical topics - the hunt for Earth-like planets around other stars - has just received an important impetus from new spectral observations with the MIDI instrument at the ESO VLT Interferometer (VLTI). An international team of astronomers [2] has obtained unique infrared spectra of the dust in the innermost regions of the proto-planetary discs around three young stars - now in a state possibly very similar to that of our solar system in the making, some 4,500 million years ago. Reporting in this week's issue of the science journal Nature, and thanks to the unequalled, sharp and penetrating view of interferometry, they show that in all three, the right ingredients are present in the right place to start formation of rocky planets at these stars.

18 november 2004: Star formation is one of the most basic phenomena in the Universe. Inside stars, primordial material from the Big Bang is processed into heavier elements that we observe today. In the extended atmospheres of certain types of stars, these elements combine into more complex systems like molecules and dust grains, the building blocks for new planets, stars and galaxies and, ultimately, for life. Violent star-forming processes let otherwise dull galaxies shine in the darkness of deep space and make them visible to us over large distances.

2 november 2004: On June 8, 2004, Venus - the Earth's sister planet - passed in front of the Sun. This rare event - the last one occurred in 1882 - attracted the attention of millions of people all over the world.

29 oktober 2004: Taking advantage of the very high spatial resolution provided by the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, a team of French and Swiss astronomers [1] has measured directly the change in angular diameter of four southern Cepheid variable stars over their pulsation cycle. When combined with spectroscopic radial velocity measurements, this allowed the astronomers to measure very accurately the distances of these stars in a quasi-geometrical way, and to calibrate the zero-point of the Cepheid Period-Luminosity empirical law. These observations constitute a fundamental step towards an independent verification of the extragalactic distance scale by interferometry.

22 oktober 2004: An international team of astronomers [2] has succeeded in measuring with high precision the velocities of a large number of planetary nebulae [3] in the intergalactic space within the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. For this they used the highly efficient FLAMES spectrograph [4] on the ESO Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory (Chile). These planetary nebulae stars free floating in the otherwise seemingly empty space between the galaxies of large clusters can be used as "probes" of the gravitational forces acting within these clusters. They trace the masses, visible as well as invisible, within these regions. This, in turn, allows astronomers to study the formation history of these large bound structures in the universe. The accurate velocity measurements of 40 of these stars confirm the view that Virgo is a highly non-uniform galaxy cluster, consisting of several subunits that have not yet had time to come to equilibrium. These new data clearly show that the Virgo Cluster of galaxies is still in its making. They also prove for the first time that one of the bright galaxies in the region scrutinized, Messier 87, has a very extended halo of stars, reaching out to at least 65 kpc. This is more than twice the size of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

29 september 2004: Today, September 29, 2004, is undisputedly the Day of Toutatis, the famous "doomsday" asteroid. Not since the year 1353 did this impressive "space rock" pass so close by the Earth as it does today. Visible as a fast-moving faint point of light in the southern skies, it approaches the Earth to within 1,550,000 km, or just four times the distance of the Moon.