Press Releases

18 May 1994: The remote planet Pluto and its moon Charon orbit the Sun at a mean distance of almost 6,000 million kilometres, or nearly fourty times farther out than the Earth. During a recent investigation by an international group of astronomers [1], the best picture ever of Pluto and Charon [2] was secured with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera at the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It shows the two objects as individual disks, and it is likely that further image enhancement will allow us to see surface features on Pluto.

21 April 1994: ESO, the European Southern Observatory, in reply to questions raised by the media would like to clarify its position with regard to recent events which concern the land on which the Paranal mountain is situated.

15 April 1994: Very difficult and time-consuming observations performed with the ESO 3.5-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) in November 1993 by an international team of astronomers [1], indicate that up to 90 percent of the matter in a distant giant galaxy maybe of a kind that cannot be seen by normal telescopes.

18 February 1994: Eight years after the passage of Comet Halley in early 1986, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory have succeeded in obtaining an image [1] of this famous object at a distance of no less than 2,820 million km from the Sun. The comet is now about as far away as giant planet Uranus. It recently passed the halfway mark towards the most distant point of its very elongated 76-year orbit. The image shows the 6 x 15 km avocado-shaped nucleus as an extremely faint point of light without any surrounding dust cloud. It appears that the surface is now completely frozen and the comet has ceased to emit dust and gas. This observation was made with the ESO 3.58 metre New Technology Telescope (NTT). It is by far the faintest and most distant image ever recorded of this comet.

27 January 1994: Astronomers all over the world are preparing themselves for observations of a most unique event: during a period of six days in July 1994, at least 21 fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 will collide with giant planet Jupiter. At the European Southern Observatory, an intensive observational campaign with most of the major telescopes at La Silla is being organized with the participation of a dozen international teams of astronomers. This is the first time ever that it has been possible to predict such a collision. Although it is difficult to make accurate estimates, it is likely that there will be important, observable effects in the Jovian atmosphere.

27 January 1994: On 23 February 1994, it will be exactly seven years since the explosion of Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud [1] was first observed, at a distance of approx. 160,000 light-years. It was the first naked-eye supernova to be seen in almost four hundred years. Few events in modern astronomy have met with such an enthusiastic response by the scientists and this famous object has been under constant surveillance ever since. After several years of relative quiescence, things are now beginning to happen in the immediate neighbourhood of SN 1987A. Recent observations with the ESO 3.5 m New Technology Telescope (NTT) indicate that interaction between the stellar material which was ejected during the explosion and the surrounding ring-shaped nebulae has started. This signals the beginning of a more active phase during which the supernova is likely to display a number of new and interesting phenomena, never before observed.

24 June 1993: The delegations of the Government of Chile and of the International Organisation ESO [1] report on the outcome of their discussions regarding the installation of the largest telescope in the world "The Very Large Telescope" and "Very Large Telescope Interferometer" (VLT /VLTI) at Cerro Paranal (in the Chilean region II — Antofagasta) and the clarification of the future relations between ESO and Chile. The object of these discussions was a closer cooperation between ESO and Chile to the mutual benefit of this country and the eight European member countries of ESO.

14 May 1993: ESO, the European Southern Observatory, in reply to questions raised by the media would like to clarify its position with regard to recent events which concern the relations between ESO and the Republic of Chile, the host state for the ESO observatories in the southern hemisphere.

27 March 1993: The past decades have witnessed a dramatic increase in our knowledge of the Universe we live in. New instruments for astronomical observations and analysis are unveiling the secrets of deep space at an ever-increasing pace. Detailed studies of planets, stars, nebulae, galaxies and strange, exotic celestial objects have provided us with new insights into the formation, structure and evolution of our Universe.

14 September 1992: An exhibition about Astronomy and the European organization for astronomy (ESO) will soon open at the Science and Technical Museum "Leonardo da Vinci" in Milan, Italy.

24 February 1992: This photo shows the newly discovered minor planet 1992 AD which is the most distant in the solar system. It was obtained at the ESO La Silla Observatory on 5 February 1992. The telescope followed the planet whose 16.7 magnitude image is round; the stars in the field are seen as short trails. The diffuse trail at the upper right corner is that of a galaxy

24 September 1991: Observations with the 3.5-m ESO New Technology Telescope by a European group of astronomers have shown that a very compact object in an extraordinary binary star, known under the astronomical designation 88433, is most probably a neutron star and not a black hole, as previously believed by most scientists. Improved observation techniques have allowed a reliable determination of the mass of this object: it is now found to weigh less than the Sun and is therefore not massive enough to be a black hole.

16 July 1991: The lonely Atacama desert is a perfect place to study distant celestial bodies in the space around us. The following story shows how this may be done, not only through powerful astronomical telescopes at isolated mountain-top observatories [1], but also down on the barren desert plain in a much more direct way.

4 December 1990: The Council of the European Southern Observatory, in session today at the ESO Headquarters in Garching near Munich, unanimously decided that the world's largest optical telescope, the 16-metre equivalent Very Large Telescope, shall be placed on Cerro Paranal [1], an isolated mountain top at 2664 m altitude in the central part of Chile's Atacama desert, some 130 kilometres south of the town of Antofagasta and 12 kilometres from the Pacific coast.

9 November 1990: A very large, white spot has recently appeared on the giant planet Saturn [1]. It is probably a great storm in the planet's atmosphere, which has been initiated by upwelling of clouds from the lower layers into the uppermost regions. The spot began as a small, white feature in Saturn's northern hemisphere and has since developed rapidly so that it now appears to completely encircle the planet's equatorial regions. "Great White Spots" have been seen on Saturn in 1876, 1903, 1933 and 1960 (see below), but the present one seems to be the biggest of them all.

24 October 1990: Astronomers working at the ESO La Silla observatory have just discovered the most distant "normal" galaxy known so far. It has been given the designation G 0102 - 190 and its distance is so great that the light we observe from it was emitted when the Universe was only one third as old as now [1].

27 September 1990: A long-term astronomical study of spiral galaxies, initiated almost a decade ago at the European Southern Observatory, has recently produced intriguing results about the presence of cold matter in the Universe. They have a direct bearing on the so-called "missing mass" problem, one of the major unsolved riddles in astronomy.

23 May 1990: With the help of "adaptive optics," a revolutionary optical concept (eso8908), infrared astronomical images have been obtained with the ESO 3.6 m telescope at the La Silla observatory which are as sharp as they would be if the telescope were situated in space. This is the first time in astronomy that a ground-based telescope of this size has been able to directly register during long time periods stellar images with a sharpness that corresponds to the theoretically possible limit.

2 March 1990: Professional and amateur astronomers all over the world are excited about the prospects of seeing a really bright comet during the coming months. A newly discovered comet, known by the name of the amateur who first saw it, is now getting brighter each day. Observations are made almost every night at the ESO La Silla Observatory and elsewhere in order to follow the development of the comet and also to try to predict the maximum brightness which the comet will reach by mid-April this year.

26 January 1990: The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) of Pasadena, California, U.S.A. and the European Southern Observatory have concluded an agreement by which ESO will undertake the responsibility of producing high-quality copies of photographic sky survey plates obtained with the Palomar 40-inch Oschin Telescope and to distribute the resulting photographic atlas [1].