Comunicados de Prensa

17 de Enero de 2007: The world's biggest infrared camera for Europe's newest telescope left the UK today for Chile. The 67 million pixel camera will equip VISTA - a UK provided survey telescope being constructed in Chile for ESO. VISTA will map the infrared sky faster than any previous telescope, studying areas of the Universe that are hard to see in the visible due to either their cool temperature, surrounding dust or high redshift.

11 de Enero de 2007: The ESO Council has just appointed Tim de Zeeuw, 50, as the next Director General of ESO, effective as of 1 September 2007, when the current Director General, Catherine Cesarsky will complete her mandate.

8 de Enero de 2007: Using ESO's Very Large Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, astronomers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the California Institute of Technology, USA, have discovered what appears to be the first known triplet of quasars. This close trio of supermassive black holes lies about 10.5 billion light-years away towards the Virgo (The Virgin) constellation.

4 de Enero de 2007: Last year proved to be another exceptional year for the European organisation for ground-based astronomy. ESO should begin the New Year with two new member states: Spain (PR 05/06) and the Czech Republic (PR 52/06).

24 de Diciembre de 2006: A Happy New Year!

22 de Diciembre de 2006: Today, an agreement was signed in Prague between ESO and the Czech Republic, aiming to make the latter become a full member of ESO as of 1 January 2007.

22 de Diciembre de 2006: On the night of 15 December 2006, the fourth and last-to-be-installed VLTI Auxiliary Telescope (AT4) obtained its 'First Light'. The first images demonstrate that AT4 will be able to deliver the excellent image quality already delivered by the first three ATs. It will soon join its siblings to perform routinely interferometric measurements.

21 de Diciembre de 2006: A new, stunning image of the cosmic spider, the Tarantula Nebula and its surroundings, finally pays tribute to this amazing, vast and intricately sculpted web of stars and gas. The newly released image, made with ESO's Wide Field Imager on the 2.2-m ESO/MPG Telescope at La Silla, covers 1 square degree on the sky and could therefore contain four times the full Moon.

20 de Diciembre de 2006: Nature has again thrown astronomers for a loop. Just when they thought they understood how gamma-ray bursts formed, they have uncovered what appears to be evidence for a new kind of cosmic explosion. These seem to arise when a newly born black hole swallows most of the matter from its doomed parent star.

20 de Diciembre de 2006: Astronomers at ESO's frontline Paranal Observatory got a surprise on the morning of 18 December when looking at the observatory's all-sky camera, MASCOT. For about 45 minutes in the early morning, an object appeared first as a bright stripe then as a cloud that dissolved.

14 de Diciembre de 2006: Today, Janez Potočnik, European Commissioner for Science and Research received a statement of support for the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers from EIROforum.

11 de Diciembre de 2006: La Astronomía acaba de recibir un impulso considerable con la decisión del comité directivo de ESO de proceder al estudio detallado del Telescopio Europeo Extremadamente Grande. Con un presupuesto de 75 millones de euros, este estudio hará posible, dentro de tres años, el comienzo de la construcción de un telescopio óptico/infrarrojo de unos 40 metros de diámetro que revolucionará la astronomía terrestre. El diseño elegido está basado en un concepto revolucionario especialmente desarrollado para un telescopio de este tamaño.

6 de Diciembre de 2006: Using VIMOS on ESO's Very Large Telescope, a team of French and Italian astronomers have shown the strong influence the environment exerts on the way galaxies form and evolve. The scientists have for the first time charted remote parts of the Universe, showing that the distribution of galaxies has considerably evolved with time, depending on the galaxies' immediate surroundings. This surprising discovery poses new challenges for theories of the formation and evolution of galaxies.

30 de Noviembre de 2006: Científicos arrojan nueva luz sobre un debate de una década. Es conocido que al morir algunas estrellas dan lugar a la explosión de una supernova. Lo que no está claro es si la estrella se quema lentamente o revienta muy rápido. De las observaciones se desprende que la materia expulsada presenta asimetrías importantes en la periferia, mientras que en el centro hay una esfera casi perfecta, lo cual sugiere que la explosión se propagaría a velocidades supersónicas.

23 de Noviembre de 2006: El aspecto cautivante de este retrato de la galaxia starburst [1] NGC 1313 contradice su desorden interior. Las densas acumulaciones de estrellas brillantes y de gas en sus brazos señalan un auténtico "baby-boom" estelar en curso. Sondeando más profundamente en el corazón de la galaxia, los astrónomos han revelado muchos enigmas que siguen desafiando nuestro entendimiento.

12 de Noviembre de 2006: ESO y la Asociación Europea para Enseñanza de la Astronomía lanzan la quinta edición de "Catch a Star!" "(¡Atrapa una Estrella!"), la competencia internacional de astronomía para estudiantes de colegios y escuelas. El concurso ofrece a los jóvenes la oportunidad de ganar un extraordinario e irrepetible viaje al observatorio estrella de ESO en Chile, así como muchos otros premios. Se invita a los estudiantes a "volverse astrónomos" y embarcarse en la gran aventura de la exploración del Universo.

7 de Noviembre de 2006: A large survey, made with ESO's VLT, has shed light on our Galaxy's ancestry. After determining the chemical composition of over 2000 stars in four of the nearest dwarf galaxies to our own, astronomers have demonstrated fundamental differences in their make-up, casting doubt on the theory that these diminutive galaxies could ever have formed the building blocks of our Milky Way Galaxy.

22 de Octubre de 2006: In its first Roadmap, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) choose the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), for which ESO is presently developing a Reference Design, as one of the large scale projects to be conducted in astronomy, and the only one in optical astronomy. The aim of the ELT project is to build before the end of the next decade an optical/near-infrared telescope with a diameter in the 30-60m range.

19 de Octubre de 2006: Astronomers have detected a new faint companion to the star HD 3651, already known to host a planet. This companion, a brown dwarf, is the faintest known companion of an exoplanet host star imaged directly and one of the faintest T dwarfs detected in the Solar neighbourhood so far. The detection yields important information on the conditions under which planets form.

4 de Octubre de 2006: Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have confirmed the extrasolar planet status of two of the 16 candidates discovered by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. One of the two confirmed exoplanets has a mass a little below 10 Jupiter masses, while the other is less than 3.8 Jupiter masses.