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Dear Fellow Communicators,
On behalf of all of us at ESO, we would like to wish you a joyful holiday season and a stellar new year! We take this opportunity to thank you for following our developments and for supporting our mission of promoting astronomy. 2018 is going to be a landmark year for ESO in terms of education and public outreach, with the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre opening 26 April. We’re looking at a challenging year ahead, but one that will surely help us progress and make our community aware and proud of its achievements!
The end of the year is a good time to look back at the most important events of the year. For us, 2017 had the following highlights:
- A number of discoveries and observations received wide news coverage including the TRAPPIST-1 discovery (eso1706), the first observations of the visible counterpart of merging neutron stars (eso1733), the discovery of an exoplanet around Ross 128 b (eso1736), and observations of the interstellar asteroid 1I/2017 U1 (`Oumuamua) (eso1737). `Oumuamua is the first interstellar object discovered (hence the “1I” in the name) and it probably takes the prize for the most peculiar object discovered in many years. ESO is proud to be among the several observatories following it. The AOF first light (eso1724) and the ELT M1 signing (eso1717) were also prominent in the media;
- Media events for the ELT first stone (eso1716) and the multi-messenger neutron star discovery (eso1733, press conference on Youtube);
- The ESO Supernova is now nearly complete and ready for operations, with significant progress on fundraising;
- 75 000 new followers across our social media platforms;
- Many launches including:
- A spectacular Open House Day (potw1743). A big thanks goes to our hard-working volunteers and curious visitors!
- The Red Dots Open Notebook Science experiment, which invited the public to join in on the new campaign of exoplanetary exploration around our nearest stars;
- Speaking of red dots, the Pale Red Dot Campaign, the first hunt for a planet around Proxima Centauri, won the Guardian University Prize (ann17013);
- The movie MUSE, The Cosmic Time Machine, produced by CNRS Images in partnership with ESO, a 35-minute documentary exploring the inspiration and story behind the MUSE spectrograph (ann17025);
- The 2017 ESO Astronomy Camp, which promises to be even better than the 2016 event.
We look forward to what the new year has in store for us!
If you are searching for last-minute holiday gift ideas, have a look in our ESOshop. We still have a few copies left of the ESO 2018 Calendar, as well as plenty of posters, high-quality mounted pictures, books and much more. Keep in mind that shipping will be on hold between 22 December 2017 and 7 January 2018.
Let’s reach new heights in astronomy together!
Lars Lindberg Christensen (lars@eso.org)
Head, ESO education and Public Outreach Department (ePOD)
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11 December 2017: The latest issue of the free magazine Science in School is now available online and in printed form. This European journal for science teachers offers up-to-date information on cutting-edge science ...
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7 December 2017: ESO’s governing body, the Council, has just authorised additional spending to cover the cost of both the five inner rings of segments for the main mirror (M1) of the ...
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13 November 2017: More than 180 video applications from 19 countries were submitted for the 2017 ESO Astronomy Camp, and the winners of the bursaries offered by ESO and the national partners have ...
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10 November 2017: The latest release of ESO’s Virtual Tours includes the option to view them in virtual reality mode as well as 360-degree panoramic mode. You can now use a cell ...
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Author: Stefano Mian
Author: Daniele Rocchi
Author: Luca Ronchi
15 December 2017: The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) promises to open a whole new chapter in astronomy when it sees first light in 2024, and scientists, engineers, designers and other experts are enthusiastically ...
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Interview with: Max Kraus
12 December 2017: High up in the mountains of Chile, ESO’s telescopes are literally built on shaky ground. They operate in some of the most active seismic regions in the world, at the ...
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Interview with: Koraljka Muzic
1 December 2017: Is it a star? Is it a planet? No, it’s a brown dwarf! More massive than Jupiter but smaller than the Sun, these fascinating astronomical objects are difficult to observe ...
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Interview with: Olivier Hainaut
24 November 2017: Big news came out earlier this month — for the first time ever, astronomers discovered an asteroid from outside our Solar System. ESO’s Very Large Telescope played a key role ...
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Interview with: Eike Guenther
17 November 2017: Exoplanets are one of the hottest topics in astronomy, and the stuff they’re made of is especially fascinating. Not so long ago, astronomers thought that exoplanets were created from the ...
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Interview with: Tania Johnston
10 November 2017: ESO telescopes give us amazing glimpses of the Universe, but they’re not the only way for us Earth-bound humans to travel to the stars. The ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor ...
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19 December 2017: On 15 December 2017, ESO Representative Fernando Comeron welcomed Dutch theoretical physicist Gerard 't Hooft to ESO's Paranal Observatory.
A professor at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, 't Hooft is ...
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15 December 2017: This ESOcast Light explores how and why engineers are undertaking wind tunnel tests for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope.
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13 December 2017: The OmegaCAM imager on ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile has captured a glittering view of the stellar nursery called Sharpless 29. Many astronomical phenomena can ...
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6 December 2017: The Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) successfully made its first observations in November 2017. Installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, ESPRESSO will ...
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29 November 2017: Astronomers using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have conducted the deepest spectroscopic survey ever. They focused on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, measuring distances and ...
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27 November 2017: Your home and the Universe have at least one thing in common: they can be very dusty places! When you get back after a very long vacation, it may happen ...
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20 November 2017: For the first time ever astronomers have studied an asteroid that has entered the Solar System from interstellar space. Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories ...
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15 November 2017: A temperate planet has been discovered only 11 light-years from Earth by a team using ESO’s unique planet-hunting HARPS instrument. The new world has the designation Ross 128 b and ...
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