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8 October 2001: A series of very detailed images of a binary system of two young stars have been combined into a movie. In merely 3 days, the stars swing around each other. As seen from the earth, they pass in front of each other twice during a full revolution, producing eclipses during which their combined brightness diminishes. A careful analysis of the orbital motions has now made it possible to deduce the masses of the two dancing stars. Both turn out to be about as heavy as our Sun. But while the Sun is about 4500 million years old, these two stars are still in their infancy.

13 October 2000: The following Press Release, now retracted, is kept on the web for information and historical reference.

11 June 1997: This new and very detailed image of the famous circumstellar disk around the southern star Beta Pictoris was obtained with the ESO ADONIS adaptive optics system at the 3.6-m telescope and the Observatoire de Grenoble coronograph. It shows (in false colours) the scattered light at wavelength 1.25 micron (J band) and is one of the best images of this interesting feature obtained so far.

9 April 1997: Circumstellar disks of gas and dust play a crucial role in the formation of stars and planets. Until now, high-resolution images of such disks around young stars within the Orion Nebula obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) constituted the most direct proof of their existence. Now, another circumstellar disk has been detected around a star in the Lagoon Nebula - also known as Messier 8 (M8) , a giant complex of interstellar gas and dust with many young stars in the southern constellation of Sagittarius and four times more distant than the Orion Nebula. The observations were carried out by an international team of scientists led by Bringfried Stecklum (Thüringer Landessternwarte, Tautenburg, Germany) [1] who used telescopes located at the ESO La Silla observatory and also observations from the HST archive. These new results are paving the road towards exciting research programmes on star formation which will become possible with the ESO Very Large Telescope.

19 January 1996: How many moons has Saturn, the second-largest planet in the solar system? Until recently, the best answer was eighteen, ranging from innermost Pan that circles the planet 75,000 km above the cloud tops in a little less than 14 hours, to distant Phoebe, 13 million km away in a reverse ('retrograde') 550-day orbit [1]. Now the situation is less clear.

25 August 1995: A very unusual comet was discovered last month, on its way from the outer reaches of the solar system towards the Sun. Although it is still situated beyond the orbit of Jupiter, it is so bright that it can be observed in even small telescopes. It has been named `Hale-Bopp' after the discoverers and is already of great interest to cometary astronomers.