Foto van de Week 2023

25 december 2023: Flying through the snow,And zipping through the air,O’er the fields we go,To ESO's home, we dare,Bells on soundtracks ring,Making spirits bright,What fun it is to fly and sing,A festive song tonight. Join us as we jingle all the way to the snow-covered ESO Headquarters in Garching, Germany, through this drone video taken in early December. While it’s fairly quiet around the office today, usually the ESO Headquarters are bustling with scientists, engineers and administrative staff who work in harmony on all aspects of astronomical research, from telescope design and development to archiving and analysing data. The communications department keeps the show on the road too, of course. ESO staff work in specially designed and award-winning buildings, which while sometimes confusing to navigate, contain a wealth of detail. Where the flat circular buildings meet, they surround a circular courtyard that has a diameter of exactly 8.2 metres — the size of ...

18 december 2023: As we are closing out 2023, we want to send our best wishes for the holidays and the new year to each and every one of you out there, from all of us at ESO. This year marked 60 years of collaboration with the Republic of Chile, 25 years of science with the Very Large Telescope and 10 years of science with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which recently published its highest-resolution image. Our next project, the Extremely Large Telescope, also reached 50% completion this year. Thanks for following along on our journey to explore the Universe. We wish you a healthy end of the year and a wonderful start to 2024!

11 december 2023: Today’s Picture of the Week captures the expansive hilltop of Cerro Armazones in Chile, the home of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). The Martian-esque ground may look flat from up here, but the peak is more than 3000 metres above sea level. Ground-based telescopes work best when the atmosphere between them and the Universe is kept to a minimum, making the ELT’s mountaintop perch perfect for observations. Much like the physical road up the mountain, the metaphorical road to the ELT has been equally long. Indeed, the first detailed studies for the project were given the go-ahead on this day exactly 17 years ago. This study kicked off the design process, although it wasn’t for another four years that Cerro Armazones was selected as the future home for the giant telescope. Many milestones have been surpassed since 11 December 2006, and of course, the design has changed somewhat since the ...

4 december 2023: A vista of smooth, chocolatey hills fills this Picture of the Week. The emptiness of this aerial photo is broken only by a white round building at its centre: the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory in the Chilean Atacama desert. Located at an altitude of around 2400 metres above sea level, the telescope started observing the sky in November 1977. This remote area has one of the darkest night skies on the Earth, allowing the telescope to observe the wonders of the night sky undisturbed. In particular, the ESO 3.6-m telescope hosts one of the most successful planet finder instruments: the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS), which measures the subtle gravitational tug that planets exert on their host stars as they orbit around them.

27 november 2023: There’s magic in this Picture of the Week; can you feel it? The strange geological formations protruding out of the desert floor are twisted and gnarled like old wizards’ hats, while the sky above is filled with thousands of stars and a myriad of mesmerising colours. This is Valle de la Luna — meaning “Valley of the Moon” — in the Chilean Atacama Desert, close to where the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner, is located. It’s easy to see where the valley gets its name from; the moon-like formations on the dried-up salt beds have been eroded by aeons of exposure to the elements and feel far more out of this world than of it. Its altitude and dry air, as well as its distance from civilisation, make it a great place for stargazing. This is particularly important for ALMA, as water vapour in ...

20 november 2023: What’s left over after a massive star reaches the end of its life I hear you ask? Take a look for yourself. This Picture of the Week shows a small but very intricate portion of the Vela supernova remnant, the violent and yet beautiful aftermath of an explosive stellar death. This dramatic scene played out around 11 000 years ago when a massive star in the constellation Vela went supernova. During this violent event, the star would have shined so brightly that it could be seen during the day. The detailed and stunning view of both the gaseous filaments in the remnant and the bright blue stars in the foreground were captured using the 286-million-pixel OmegaCAM at the VLT Survey Telescope, hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. OmegaCAM can take images through several filters that each let the telescope observe the light emitted in a distinct colour. To capture this image, ...

13 november 2023: The ESO 3.6-m telescope sits perched at the summit of the La Silla mountain in the Chilean Atacama Desert, 2400 m above sea level, in this Picture of the Week. A part of ESO’s La Silla Observatory, this location provides conditions ideal for stargazing, and is home to the prolific planet-hunter HARPS, the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher. In the dry desert, the skies are clear, and there is rarely a cloud to obstruct the view. Far away from the nearest cities, the skies are dark. The faint green airglow towards the horizon is naturally caused by molecules in Earth’s upper atmosphere. Even the dim, warmly toned lights of the access road, seen at the bottom of the image, are designed to limit the amount of light pollution they produce. At the top we see one of our neighbouring galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud, known as lafken, labken or ...

6 november 2023: The animation in this Picture of the Week shows us the nearby galaxy NGC3456 in thousands of different colours or wavelengths of light, captured with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory. Thanks to observations of more than 100 galaxies, including this one, astronomers are discovering there are properties of massive stars that could influence whether or not they end their lives in a spectacular supernova explosion. Core collapse supernovae are the extremely energetic deaths of massive stars, those with eight times or more mass than the Sun. Aside from their sheer size, the exact properties — such as chemical makeup — of the stars that die as supernovae are poorly understood because we rarely get to see them before they explode. But, we can study the explosion sites. A new study led by former ESO student Thallis Pessi at the Universidad Diego Portales (Chile) has done precisely that. ...

30 oktober 2023: It’s spooky season, and ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) got the memo for this Halloween-inspired Picture of the Week. A full moon rises up from behind Cerro Armazones, the ELT’s perch in the Chilean Atacama Desert, where construction of the monster telescope is underway. In this image –– a throwback to a famous scene in E.T. –– we see the steel skeleton of the telescope dome eerily illuminated under the moonlight. It now stands at a towering 80 metres high; when completed, the whole structure will rotate 360 degrees to observe the night sky, all while weighing 6100 tonnes — about as heavy as 1 500 000 pumpkins. This ghostly image was captured on 28 October 2023, from around 20 kilometres away close to the entrance to ESO’s Paranal Observatory. It’s not every day that the Moon is positioned so perfectly behind the mountaintop, so an event was carefully planned ...

23 oktober 2023: The Great Dimming Event (GDE) of Betelgeuse, where the red supergiant star visibly faded in late 2019 and early 2020, puzzled and fascinated the world as it happened. Some thought that the star, which is coming to the end of its life, was about to explode and go supernova. In this glowing Picture of the Week, astronomers have shed new light on how Betelgeuse became darker, confirming that the GDE wasn’t a precursor to a spectacular supernova after all — sorry! Here we see Betelgeuse as it was in December 2018, February 2020 and December 2020, capturing the famed star before, during, and after the GDE. A team led by Julien Drevon, Florentin Millour and Pierre Cruzalèbes at the Université Côte d’Azur (France) used the MATISSE infrared instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) to obtain high-resolution images of the star. The top images here show its “surface” or ...

16 oktober 2023: Standing majestically at the top of a hill at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, surveying the watercolour scenery of another sunset in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is the New Technology Telescope (NTT). The star of this Picture of the Week has been ticking along, making discovery after discovery, ever since it was inaugurated in 1989. Its home at La Silla sits at an altitude of 2400 metres and is far from sources of light pollution, giving the NTT uninterrupted views of the Universe. This plucky telescope has a 3.58-metre primary mirror, which it uses to observe the cosmos in optical and near-infrared wavelengths of light. Currently, the NTT is equipped with two instruments: the Son of ISAAC (SOFI) and the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera 2 (EFOSC2). The former received its unusual name because of its similarity to an instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT, located further north) that went ...

9 oktober 2023: The white pearl on the left side of this Picture of the Week is one of the Exoplanets in Transits and their Atmospheres telescopes — ExTrA for short. Located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory at an altitude of 2375m, ExTrA is a French national project comprising three 60 centimetre telescopes that are working towards one goal: to detect Earth-sized planets in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. ExTrA focuses on planets around very small stars, with a radius down to a tenth of the Sun. It relies on the so-called transit method, looking for slight dips in the light emitted from a star when a planet passes in front of it, like a tiny eclipse. The smaller the star is, the larger the dip an Earth-sized planet will cause. Each telescope observes a target star and four reference ones to calibrate the effects of Earth’s atmosphere. The telescopes can observe ...

2 oktober 2023: There are two different types of nebulae brought to you in this Picture of the Week. Each appears with a distinct colour in the visible sky and are captured here using the wide-field camera OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean desert. The large, bright emission nebula at the centre, IC1284, is a star-forming region composed primarily of hydrogen. Its rosy glow comes from electrons within the hydrogen atoms: they’re excited by the radiation from young stars, but then they lose energy and emit a specific colour or wavelength of light. One of the filters on OmegaCAM lets through this particular reddish colour, hence the nebula’s look. Meanwhile, another colour filter highlights the blue reflection nebulae NGC6589 and NGC6590 in the lower right corner. The dust in a reflection nebula preferentially scatters shorter, bluer wavelengths of light from nearby stars, which is ...

25 september 2023: It’s hard not to get sucked into this Picture of the Week, taken using a long exposure at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Above the mountaintop observatory, a spectacular dance is playing out: imaged over several hours, stars appear to make their way in long arcs, called star trails, across the night sky. Paranal is home to one of the world’s most advanced optical telescopes: ESO’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT. This flagship facility actually consists of four Unit Telescopes and four smaller movable Auxiliary Telescopes, like the one in the foreground on the right. But what are those mysterious beams of orange light erupting from one of the Unit Telescopes? Well, they’re for making stars, kind of. The Four Laser Guide Star Facility propagates laser beams[1] into the sky, making sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow like artificial stars. Each laser delivers 22 watts of ...

18 september 2023: This Picture of the Week shows the unique stellar system HIP 81208, as captured by ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Astronomers thought HIP 81208 was a system consisting of a massive central star (A, the central bright spot), a brown dwarf (B) circling around it, and a low-mass star (C) orbiting further away. However, a new study has revealed a never-before-seen hidden gem: an object (Cb), approximately 15 times more massive than Jupiter, orbiting around the smaller of the two stars (C). The discovery of Cb means that HIP 81208 is a uniquely intriguing system with two stars and two smaller bodies orbiting each one –– in other words, a hierarchical quadruple system. The mass of the newly found Cb object places it right at the border between planets and brown dwarfs –– failed stars that are not massive and hot enough to fuse hydrogen into helium. The ...

11 september 2023: There are several galaxies in this Picture of the Week, but the most fascinating is probably the one surrounded by four light-blue dots, resembling a flower with blue petals. But, are these dots real? Yes and no… Taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), this image shows a so-called Einstein Cross. The four ‘petals’ are images of a distant galaxy hidden behind the orange galaxy at the centre. Something very fascinating happens to allow us to detect the light from this hidden object: the galaxy at the centre acts as a gravitational lens, bending the light emitted from the distant galaxy around it. As a result, we see several images of the distant galaxy, distorted and magnified. In the special configuration of these two galaxies, the hidden one appears as four images around the central ‘lens’ galaxy, forming a cross-like (or flower-like) pattern dubbed an Einstein Cross. Gravitational lensing thus ...

4 september 2023: It might look like the opening scene from The Lion King, but this stunning Picture of the Week was actually taken in the Chilean Atacama Desert rather than the African savannas. Taking centre stage is ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), or part of it, at least. The ELT’s steel dome is about 80 metres tall and one day it will play host to the world’s biggest eye on the sky. When finished, the dome will weigh some 6100 tonnes and be capable of rotating 360 degrees on a set of 36 stationary trolleys. This spectacular photograph of the sunrise over Cerro Armazones, the ELT’s perch, was shot on 29 August from around 23 kilometres away on top of another famous mountain: Cerro Paranal, home to the ELT’s older sibling, ESO’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT. You could say the stars were aligned for this image: since the position of the ...

28 augustus 2023: The flat panorama of the Chajnantor plateau dominates this Picture of the Week. Situated at an altitude of around 5000 metres in the Chilean Andes, this plateau is one of the driest places on Earth — challenging for humans, but perfect for astronomical observations. This breathtaking landscape is home to the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), the white structure down in the centre of the image. Inaugurated in 2005, APEX is a 12-metre diameter radio telescope that studies the cold, dusty and distant Universe, and is operated by ESO on behalf of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR). Now look ahead, towards the distant brown mountains, and you might be able to make out a bunch of white dots. Those are in fact the 66 high-precision antennas of ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, operated by ESO together with its international partners. Like APEX, ALMA’s antennas observe the coldest ...

21 augustus 2023: Welcome to ESO’s La Silla Observatory, home to several telescopes since the 1960s and the setting of this Picture of the Week. Located 600 km north of Chile’s capital Santiago, La Silla sits at around 2400 meters above sea level. More than just the telescopes live at this idyllic location: the staff who run them do too. Astronomers, engineers and support staff spend shifts of several days working on-site, and the buildings in the foreground allow them to live, work and relax in the harsh conditions of the Atacama desert. The building at the centre contains bedrooms, a canteen, a gym and a cinema room, among other facilities. On the left we can see dormitories where visiting astronomers can rest after a long night observing the cosmos. Meanwhile, the long white building right at the bottom is the New Operations Building, from which the New Technology Telescope (NTT), ESO 3.6-metre ...

14 augustus 2023: This Picture of the Week — taken with ESO’s Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope (VISTA) at Paranal Observatory in Chile — might look like a scene from a snowy winter's night, but it’s not. It’s an infrared image of NGC 6723, a globular cluster located about 28 000 light years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. Globular clusters are spherical-shaped groups of stars, tightly bound together by gravity. Their name is derived from the Latin word globulus, meaning small sphere — somewhat misleading given that NGC 6723, as most globular clusters, contains hundred of thousands to millions of stars. So far, astronomers have found more than 150 globular clusters in our galaxy, the Milky Way, with most of them estimated to be at least 10 billion years old and hosting some of the oldest stars in the galaxy. Globular clusters were key to pinpointing our own location within the Milky ...