Press Releases

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.

29 June 1993: On June 25, 1993, Schott Glaswerke (Mainz, Germany) officially handed over to ESO the largest mirror blank ever made. Weighing 22,000 kilograms and with a diameter of 8.2 metres, the blank has a thickness of only 177 millimetres.

22 June 1993: ESO's Contribution to the European Week for Scientific Culture The European Southern Observatory is pleased to announce the launch of its new programme "Future Astronomers of Europe". It is organised in conjunction with the European Week for Scientific Culture (November 22 -27, 1993), with support from the Commission of the European Communities.

3 June 1993: The recent identification of the optical image of a pulsar in the Large Magellanic Cloud is a fine illustration of astronomy as a high-tech international science. It is the first extragalactic pulsar to be so identified and only the third radio pulsar, after those in the Crab and Vela nebulae in the Milky Way, for which this has been possible.

3 June 1993: Although astronomy is an exact natural science, chance sometimes plays an important role. The recent discovery during an otherwise routine observation of the hitherto brightest known double quasar [1] would not have been possible without some luck.

1 June 1993: On March 28, 1993, American astronomers David Jewitt and Jane Luu on Hawaii discovered a slow-moving minor planet of magnitude 23. More observations were made the following night, confirming the unusual motion and indicating that it is located at a very large distance from the Sun, possibly far beyond Pluto, the outermost known, major planet. It was given the preliminary designation 1993 FW (IAU Circular 5730)

29 January 1993: This photo is a composite of five exposures of Minor Planet no.~4179, also known as Toutatis, obtained with the 3.5-m ESO New Technology Telescope on December 21, 1992, by ESO-astronomer Jesper Storm. At this time, Toutatis was about 13 million km from the Earth, i.e. 33 times more distant than the Moon. On December 8, this Minor Planet passed within 3.6 million km from the Earth, but at that time it was not possible to observe it with ground-based optical telescopes, because it was situated between the Earth and the Sun. However, very good radar images were obtained which showed thecratered surface of the object.

3 December 1992: The Council of the European Southern Observatory [1], meeting at the ESO Headquarters in Garching on December 1-2, 1992, has decided to initiate a Programme by this organisation, aimed at supporting some of the scientifically most active and internationally highly esteemed astronomical institutes and research groups in Central and Eastern Europe (C&EE).

13 November 1992: Based on observations just obtained with the ESO New Technology Telescope at La Silla, a group of Italian astronomers [1] have securely identified the optical emission from the mysterious GEMINGA object. Although GEMINGA is the second strongest source of energetic gamma-rays in the sky, its optical image is extremely faint and the real nature of this strange object has long been a subject of debate. The present break-through became possible when the astronomers discovered and accurately measured the object's motion in the sky. As a consequence, GEMINGA is now believed to be the closest neutron star known to us, at a distance of no more than 300 light-years, possibly even smaller.

13 August 1992: Italian astronomers, working from the Astronomical Observatory in Trieste, have performed remote observations with the ESO 3.5 metre New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla, Chile. This is the first time ever that such observations have been made directly from an astronomical institute in one of the ESO member countries. Quite unexpectedly, a "cosmic mirage", that is a gravitational lens in a distant cluster of galaxies, was found during these observations.

10 July 1992: This photo shows Comet Grigg-Skjellerup, as imaged by the ESO 3.6 m telescope at the La Silla Observatory in the early morning of July 10, 1992, just 15 hours before the Giotto encounter with this comet. The observation was made by Dr. Klaus Jockers from the Max-Planck-Institut für Aeronomie (Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany), and in the course of a special monitoring programme in support of the Giotto Extended Mission. The digital image was transmitted to the ESO Headquarters in Garching via the permanent satellite link, immediately following the observations. The photo is a composite of four one-minute red-sensitive exposures. The other objects in the field are galactic stars.

7 May 1992: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has revealed an unusual and fascinating new optical jet in the nucleus of the elliptical galaxy NGC 3862.

22 April 1992: The photo shows a model of the ESO 16-metre equivalent Very Large Telescope (VLT), as it will appear on the Paranal mountain in the Chilean Atacama desert towards the end of the present decade. The VLT will become the world's largest optical telescope when it is ready.

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: ESO is now awarding a major contract for its Very Large Telescope (VLT) to the "AES Consortium" of three Italian companies. It concerns the construction of the main mechanical structures of the four 8-m VLT unit telescopes, each of which will weigh more than 440 tons and yet must be machined with sub-micron precision in order to allow astronomical observations of the highest quality.

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.

31 May 1991: The ESO New Technology Telescope on La Silla has again proven its extraordinary abilities. Known since two years as the world's best optical telescope [1], it has now produced the "deepest" view into the distant regions of the Universe ever obtained with any ground-or space-based telescope. The new picture shows enormous numbers of extremely faint and remote galaxies whose images almost completely fill the field of view. Expressed in astronomical terms, the picture reaches beyond magnitude 29 [2].

17 January 1991: Acting on information received from Danish scientists working with an X-ray telescope on a Soviet satellite, astronomers at the ESO La SiIla observatory in Chile have discovered a strange new star in the southern constellation of Musca (the Fly). Preliminary observations with the ESO 3.5-m New Technology Telescope indicate that the object is a nova, most probably a small, very dense star in a binary system whose brightness in a dramatic event has suddenly increased about 1000 times. The available optical and X-ray observations point to a quite unusual object.