Imágenes de la semana

11 de Noviembre de 2008: The Carina Nebula is a large bright nebula that surrounds several clusters of stars. It contains two of the most massive and luminous stars in our Milky Way galaxy, Eta Carinae and HD 93129A. Located 7500 light years away, the nebula itself spans some 260 light years across, about 7 times the size of the Orion Nebula, and is shown in all its glory in this mosaic. It is based on images collected with the 1.5-m Danish telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory. Being brighter than one million Suns, Eta Carinae (the brightest star in this image) is the most luminous star known in the Galaxy, and has most likely a mass over 100 times that of the Sun. It is the closest example of a luminous blue variable, the last phase in the life of a very massive star before it explodes in a fiery supernova. Eta Carinae is ...

4 de Noviembre de 2008: M1-67 is the youngest wind-nebula around a Wolf-Rayet star, called WR124, in our Galaxy. These Wolf-Rayet stars start their lives with dozens of times the mass of our Sun, but loose most of it through a powerful wind, which is ultimately responsible for the formation of the nebula. Ten years ago, Hubble Space Telescope observations revealed a wealth of small knots and substructures inside the nebula. The same team, led by Cédric Foellmi (ESO), has now used ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) to watch how these structures have evolved and what they can teach us about stellar winds, their chemistry, and how they mix with the surrounding interstellar medium, before the star will eventually blow everything away in a fiery supernova explosion. The image is based on FORS1 data obtained by the Paranal Science team with the VLT through 2 wide (B and V) and 3 narrow-band filters.

30 de Septiembre de 2008: A night of work for the Paranal Observatory, in the Chilean Atacama Desert. This picture, taken on 20 September, shows the incredible beauty of the night sky above the most advanced telescope in the world, ESO's Very Large Telescope. The Milky Way is clearly seen in this superb image.

22 de Septiembre de 2008: Composite colour-coded image of another magnificent spiral galaxy, NGC 7424, at a distance of 40 million light-years. It is based on images obtained with the multi-mode VIMOS instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) in three different wavelength bands. The image covers 6.5 x 7.2 square arcminutes on the sky. North is up and East is to the right. Read more about this superb object in the ESO Press Release eso0436.

21 de Agosto de 2008: Esta imagen es una composición de color del cúmulo globular NGC 3201, obtenida con el instrumento WFI, instalado en el Telescopio de 2,2 metros ESO/MPG, en La Silla. Los cúmulos globulares son grandes agregados de estrellas que pueden contener hasta millones de ellas. Están entre los objetos más antiguos observados en el universo y se formaron, probablemente, al mismo tiempo que la Vía Láctea, en una fase temprana después del Big Bang. Este cúmulo globular particular está situado a unos 16.000 años luz de distancia, hacia la constelación austral de la Vela. Los datos fueron obtenidos como parte del sondeo ESO Imaging Survey (EIS), un sondeo público llevado a cabo por ESO y por los estados miembros, en preparación para la primera luz del VLT. La imagen original y los datos astronómicos se pueden encontrar en las páginas del EIS Pre-Flames Survey Data Release, donde también están disponibles muchas otras ...

14 de Agosto de 2008: The centre of our Milky Way galaxy is located in the southern constellation Sagittarius (The Archer) and is "only" 26,000 light-years away. On high-resolution images, it is possible to discern thousands of individual stars within the central, one light-year wide region. Using the motions of these stars to probe the gravitational field, observations over the last decade have shown that a mass of about 3 million times that of the Sun is concentrated within a radius of only 10 light-days of the compact radio and X-ray source SgrA* (Sagittarius A) at the centre of the star cluster. This means that SgrA* is the most likely counterpart of the black hole believed to exist at the centre of our Galaxy. This image was obtained in mid-2002 with the NACO instrument at the 8.2-m VLT Yepun telescope. It combines frames in three infrared wavebands between 1.6 and 3.5 µm. The compact objects ...

7 de Agosto de 2008: Paranal, the site of the VLT, was chosen for its unique characteristics: extreme dryness, very low cloud coverage, high altitude, and distant from any source of pollution. This wide-angle shot of the Atacama desert around Paranal, which shows the VLT and, in foreground, VISTA, summarizes it all. Photo taken in November 2007.

30 de Julio de 2008: The "Very Large Telescope Video Collection 2008" features High Definition video material which was obtained in June 2008. For the first time, ESO distributes HD-footage of the world's most advanced ground-based observing facility and provides free access to video sequences of outstanding technical quality and beauty. The material has been edited especially for broadcast use, without commentary or music.

17 de Julio de 2008: The first successful movement of an ALMA antenna took place at the Operations Support Facility (OSF) on 8 July 2008. The antenna transporter "Lore", one of the two units manufactured by Scheuerle under contract by ESO and delivered recently at the OSF, has been used to move one 12-m antenna from their site erection facility to an external antenna pad for sky testing.

7 de Julio de 2008: Mientras ALMA se encuentra actualmente en construcción, los astrónomos ya están realizando observaciones en el área de la astronomía milimétrica y submilimétrica en Chajnantor, con el Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). Este es un telescopio de 12 metros de diámetro con tecnología de última generación. Opera en el sitio de ALMA y se basa en un prototipo de antena del mismo proyecto. Su óptica fue modificada y la superficie de la antena cuenta con una mayor precisión. Además, está diseñado para aprovechar la excelente nitidez del cielo, realizando observaciones en longitudes de onda entre los 0,2 y 1,4 mm. Esta imagen está disponible en la tienda virtual ESOshop

1 de Julio de 2008: The image shows X-shooter, the first of the second generation VLT instruments, under test in the integration lab at ESO, Garching. The instrument has been built by a Consortium including ESO and institutes from Denmark, Italy, The Netherlands and France, and will start operation at the telescope in 2009. X-shooter is a single target, wide band, intermediate spectral resolution spectrograph, designed to get the full spectrum of the faintest cosmic sources from the atmospheric cutoff in the near-ultraviolet to the infrared K-band in a single exposure. In this image the instrument is shown as mounted on a telescope Cassegrain focus simulator, pointing at a large zenith distance. At the centre is the cryostat with the near-infrared arm of the spectrograph and at the left is the lower side of the visual spectrograph with its CCD detector. The two large boxes on the sides host the control electronics of the instrument.

23 de Junio de 2008: El serpenteante camino que une el Campamento de Apoyo a la Operaciones de ALMA, ubicado a 3000 metros de altura en los Andes chilenos, con el Lugar de Operaciones de las Antenas, a 5000 metros de altura, cruza un área dominada por enormes cactus (Echinopsis Atacamensis). Estos cactus crecen un promedio de 1 cm al año y llegan a alcanzar alturas de hasta 9 mts. El Embajador Fotográfico de ESO Stéphane Guisard inmortalizó el hermoso cielo que cubre esta zona ubicada en el Desierto de Atacama en Chile. Esta imagen es parte de la prestigiosa exhibición fotográfica internacional El Mundo de Noche – Un mundo, Un Cielo. El Observatorio Europeo Austral (ESO) produjo una versión para Chile de esta exhibición sin fines de lucro, en el marco del Año Internacional de la Astronomía 2009.

10 de Junio de 2008: This aerial view of Cerro Paranal, the site of ESO's Very Large Telescope, was obtained in 1994. It shows the construction of the concrete base for the four telescope enclosures. To the left and a little lower than the rest of the platform is the excavation for the control building. The platform altitude is about 2640 metres above sea level and it measures about 150 metres across. The width of the access road is no less than 12 metres, i.e. nearly equal to that of a three-lane highway; this is necessary to ensure the safe transport of all telescope parts, especially the four 8.2-metre fragile mirrors, to the top. The summit of Paranal has been blasted away so to create the flat platform that supports the 4 Unit Telescopes, as well as the network of tunnels that transport the light from the telescopes to the interferometric laboratory. On this 1994 ...

26 de Mayo de 2008: El cielo rotativo encima ESO's Very Large Telescope en Paranal. La exposición tras mucho tiempo muestra las estrellas rotando por el cielo alrededor al polo celestial del sur (izquierda) y al polo celestial del norte (derecha). El Ecuador celestial estar al en el medio de la imagen – donde parece que las estrellas se mueven en una línea recta. El movimiento del VLT recinto también se pueden ver.

13 de Mayo de 2008: Heavyweights at 4,000 metre altitude: this photo shows the two ALMA antenna transporters during the final phase of the acceptance testing in April on the road between the ALMA OSF at 2,900 metre altitude and the AOS at 5,000 metres. The first transporter ("Otto") is travelling unloaded, while the second one ("Lore") is carrying the 115-tonne antenna dummy.

4 de Mayo de 2008: An image of the planet Uranus (located 20 Astronomical units from Earth) obtained at the Very Large Telescope Observatory using the Adaptive Optics system NAOS and the near-infrared imager CONICA to capture high-contrast images of the giant planet and its system of satellites and rings during its 2008 equinox. Every 42 years, the ring (and satellites) plane of Uranus crosses the Sun, providing us with a unique opportunity to observe the rings while they present their edge to us. Ring plane crossing also allow us to observe the rings form their dark side (i.e. while the Sun is illuminating them from the opposite side), so one can search for faint satellites, faint rings, or faint ring structures, which could not be seen otherwise. Ring Plane Crossings are also an excellent opportunity to observe mutual events between satellites such as eclipse or occultation phenomena. The image above corresponds to a one ...

20 de Marzo de 2008: The 8.2-m primary mirror of Yepun, Unit Telescope 4 of ESO's Very Large Telescope, after its recoating in early March

11 de Marzo de 2008: The central region of the Orion Nebula (M42, NGC 1976) as seen in the near-infrared by the High Acuity Wide field K-band Imager (HAWK-I) instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope at Paranal.

25 de Febrero de 2008: Arrival of the ALMA Antenna Transporters at the Operations Support Facility (OSF) in Chile as the convoy passed through the Valle de Luna.

11 de Febrero de 2008: La determinación de la distancia a RS Pup, siguiendo el método del astrónomo norteamericano Robert Havlen, se basa en la medición de la diferencia de fase entre la variación de la estrella y la variación de características nebulares aisladas. Debido a que la luminosidad de la estrella cambia en un patrón muy distintivo, la presencia de la nebulosa permite a los astrónomos ver ecos de luz y utilizarlos para medir la distancia a la estrella. La luz que viajó desde la estrella a un grano de polvo y luego al telescopio llega un poco más tarde que la luz que llega directamente de la estrella al telescopio. En consecuencia, si medimos el brillo de una mancha o zona de polvo aislada y específica en la nebulosa, obtendremos una curva de brillo que tiene la misma forma que la variación de la Cefeida, pero desplazada en el tiempo. Este retraso se ...