Zdjęcie tygodnia

14 marca 2022: This image features the spectacular galaxy NGC 4254, also known as Messier 99. It’s an example of a grand design spiral galaxy, featuring strong, prominent, well-defined arms that wrap clearly around the galaxy’s centre. Messier 99 is located 49 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Coma Berenices. Here it was imaged in exquisite detail by the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). It is a combination of observations conducted in different colours, or wavelengths, of light, showing clouds of gas ionised by newly born stars. Hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur gas are shown in red, blue and orange respectively. The image was taken as part of the Physics at High Angular resolution in Nearby GalaxieS (PHANGS) project, which is making high-resolution observations of nearby galaxies across all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum to understand the life-cycle of star formation in galaxies.

7 marca 2022: Around 500 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor lies a rather peculiar looking galaxy, known as the Cartwheel galaxy. It was once a normal spiral galaxy that underwent a head-on interaction with a smaller companion galaxy several million years ago, giving it its signature cartwheel appearance. But there are other curious things about this object. Something interesting is taking place in the lower left corner of the right image, captured in December 2021 with ESO’s New Technology Telescope (NTT): a supernova. The image on the left, taken in August 2014 by the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows the galaxy before this supernova took place. This event, called SN2021afdx, is a type II supernova, which occurs when a massive star reaches the end of its evolution. Supernovae can cause a star to shine brighter than its entire host galaxy and can be ...

28 lutego 2022: A stunning night view, taken close to the 1.54m Danish Telescope and the 3.6m telescope on the road at La Silla, shows the Milky Way above the horizon, accompanied by the Magellanic Clouds. ESO’s 3.6m Telescope, seen here atop a hill at the centre of the image, is home to HARPS, an instrument dedicated to the discovery of planets outside the Solar System via the radial velocity method. This method enables the detection of a planet by measuring the wobbling motion of the central star caused by the gravitational pull of the planet itself. The towers on the left are the support structures of the BlackGEM telescopes, which had not been installed yet when this image was taken. BlackGEM is an array of telescopes that will search for the light emitted by the optical counterparts of the most powerful gravitational-wave sources, namely colliding neutron stars and black holes. On the ...

21 lutego 2022: The Sun rises behind Cerro Armazones in this image from 2016, with the sunlight marking the flat silhouette of the mountain top and Venus witnessing the beginning of a new day from just above the mountain itself. The picture is a stunning example of crepuscular rays, occurring when objects such as clouds or mountains block part of the incoming sunlight, a phenomenon typical at sunrise and sunset when the Sun is low on the horizon or below it. The top of Cerro Armazones was flattened to become home to the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), ESO’s next flagship observatory currently under construction. With its main mirror 39 metres in diameter, the ELT will be the world’s largest eye on the Universe, able to collect 100 000 000 times more light than the human eye. It will help astronomers find new planets where life may have developed, shed light on the nature ...

14 lutego 2022: Between Mars and Jupiter lie some of the relics of the early Solar System: the main asteroid belt. This belt is full of unusual asteroids whose origins reveal the building blocks of the early terrestrial planets. Of these, one of the more intriguing is Elektra, imaged here using the instrument SPHERE, installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile. Previously, Elektra was known to have not one but two moons orbiting it, shown by the orange and green orbits respectively. But now a team of astronomers, led by Anthony Berdeu, from the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, have found a new satellite orbiting the asteroid — shown with the blue orbit. This discovery makes Elektra the first ever quadruple asteroid system. This new, third moonlet of Elektra, provisionally named S/2014 (130) 2, lies closer to its parent asteroid than the other moons, at an average distance just under ...

7 lutego 2022: Lurking about 70 million light years away from Earth in the constellation Grus, you will find the galaxy NGC 7582 — a spiral galaxy harbouring a supermassive black hole at its core. These images were captured as part of a study using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to uncover the effect of an active black hole on the formation of stars in the galaxy. The galaxy contains an active galactic nucleus (AGN) — an extremely energetic central engine powered by the supermassive black hole gobbling up material in its immediate surroundings. Matter heats up in this process, launching huge amounts of energy and powerful winds into the surrounding area. But what effect does this have on the galaxy at large? To find out, a recent study, led by Stéphanie Juneau from NSF's NOIRLab in the USA, looked at the distribution of different ionised elements in the ...

31 stycznia 2022: Construction on the world’s biggest eye on the sky, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is making progress! After a significant slow-down of the building works due to the COVID-19 pandemic — including almost a year of complete site closure — works resumed in mid-2021. As this image from January 2022 shows, the foundations of the mammoth 39-m telescope have been laid, taking us one step closer to uncovering some of the most elusive mysteries of the Universe. The first forms of the ELT’s spectacular dome are taking shape. The immense structure will be about 80 metres high, with a diameter of about 88 metres, roughly equivalent to the area of a football pitch. To the left you can see the scaffolding and the first formwork of the dome’s pier. The pier will be surrounded by a circular auxiliary building, and its concrete foundation is almost complete. The various electrical, thermal, ...

24 stycznia 2022: Around 60 million light-years away, in the constellation Virgo, the two galaxies NGC4567 and NGC4568, nicknamed the Butterfly Galaxies due to their wing-like structure, are beginning to collide and merge into each other. This is depicted in this picture captured by the FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) instrument, which is mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Andes. Galaxy collisions are not unusual in the Universe. We may imagine them to be violent and catastrophic, but in reality they are surprisingly peaceful, like a waltz performed by stars, gas and dust, choreographed by gravity. This kind of collision and merger is also thought to be the eventual fate of the Milky Way, which scientists believe will undergo a similar interaction with our neighbouring galaxy Andromeda. FORS2 is often nicknamed Paranal’s “Swiss Army knife” for its incredible versatility, and it’s in ...

17 stycznia 2022: Like a silent sentinel, ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) stands under the scattered stars of the Milky Way in this ethereal Picture of the Week. The VST, which recently celebrated its 10th birthday, is located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory along with its namesake, the Very Large Telescope (VLT). However, the VST serves a very different purpose to the VLT. Rather than scrutinising small patches of the sky in great detail, it constantly scans much wider areas of the sky, mapping and cataloging celestial sources ranging from nearby stars to distant galaxies. ESO’s Paranal Observatory, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is an ideal location to carry out ground-based astronomy. It boasts over 300 clear nights per year and its remote location, far from light pollution, gives rise to skies that are dark enough to see the Milky Way in the stunning detail captured in this image.

10 stycznia 2022: This picture of the week looks almost good enough to eat! However, despite its resemblance to a mouthwatering caramel swirl it is in fact an image of the NGC 1300 galaxy, located approximately 61 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Eridanus. NGC 1300 is a spiral galaxy, with a bar of stars and gas –– seen here crossing the image horizontally –– and a central ring of intense star formation. The image is a combination of observations conducted at different colours –– or wavelengths –– of light. The golden caramel glow corresponds to clouds of molecular gas, the raw material out of which stars form. These data were taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner. The bluish regions in the background reveal the distribution of slightly older, already formed stars, imaged by the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope ...

3 stycznia 2022: A very bright and large point is the undisputed protagonist of the top half of this picture of the sky above ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) on Cerro Paranal in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Yet if you take a closer look, you will notice it is not just one point, but two, very close to each other. What you see is, in fact, a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter and Saturn are the two largest planets in the Solar System, almost 320 and 95 times as massive as the Earth, respectively. They are not rocky, like the Earth or Mars, but are mainly made up of hydrogen. They both have tens of moons, many of which we think did not form together with the planets they orbit, but were instead captured at a later stage by their strong gravitational fields. Conjunctions occur when two objects are aligned in the sky. ...

27 grudnia 2021: From its dome on Cerro Paranal in Chile’s Atacama desert, the ESO-operated Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) enjoys a stunning view of not only the majestic southern heavens, but also of the nearby mountainous peak, home to ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Conceived and developed by a consortium of 18 universities in the United Kingdom, VISTA is the world’s largest telescope entirely devoted to mapping the sky in infrared light. It carries out six public surveys taking up the majority of its observing time. The goal is to discover objects such as brown dwarfs, variable stars and ancient quasars, shed new light on fields such as the nature of dark matter and galactic structures, and even help create a 3D map of about five percent of the entire observable Universe. But why observe in the infrared? Because it allows VISTA not only to admire the cool side ...

20 grudnia 2021: As 2021 comes to an end, we send our best wishes to you and your families! Like its predecessor, this last year has been challenging to most of us. Here at ESO we have worked hard to continue exploring the Universe and sharing its wonders with you while keeping our staff safe and protected. On behalf of everyone at ESO, we wish you a healthy end of the year and a wonderful start of 2022!

13 grudnia 2021: This week’s picture may just hypnotise you! Resembling a vortex or an optical illusion, the starry circles draw you deeper into this breathtaking mountainous landscape of Chile’s Atacama Desert, home to ESO's La Silla Observatory. Each circular streak represents an individual star which maps out a star trail. Such trails are due to Earth’s rotation, which causes the stars to seemingly move across the sky, slowly tracing out perfect rings centred on the south celestial pole as they do so. A photograph like this therefore requires a long exposure to capture the passage of time. La Silla is located some 2400 metres above sea level, and offers perfect observing conditions for long-exposure shots like this; the site experiences over 300 clear nights a year! Here, ESO operates two of the most productive 4-metre class telescopes in the world: the ESO 3.6-metre telescope which is home to the world's foremost extrasolar ...

6 grudnia 2021: This family portrait of the telescopes residing at ESO’s La Silla Observatory was captured in 2019 during the breathtaking sunset over the outskirts of Chilean Atacama Desert. Standing tall at the front of the portrait is one of La Silla’s new family members: BlackGEM, an array of optical telescopes which will join soon the search for some of the most powerful and dramatic events in the Universe, such as merging neutron stars and black holes. This robotic array was developed by Radboud University (from where it is remotely controlled), the Netherlands Research School for Astronomy (NOVA), and the KU Leuven. These exotic events cause ripples in the fabric of spacetime known as gravitational waves. BlackGEM will work together with gravitational wave detectors such as LIGO and Virgo to pinpoint in visible light the sources responsible for gravitational waves. This will allow for bigger telescopes — such as ESO’s Very Large ...

29 listopada 2021: Just as people at a busy crossroad may accidentally bump into each other, so too can galaxies in the Universe! But in this case, the outcome is more dramatic than a small nudge. When two galaxies clash, they merge into each other, giving birth to a new, bigger one. One example is the NGC 7727 galaxy, shown in this image from ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) in Chile. Located 89 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Aquarius, NGC 7727 is believed to be the result of a clash between two galaxies that occurred about one billion years ago. The consequences of this tremendous cosmic bump are still evident in the peculiar, irregular shape of NGC 7727 and the streams of stars in its outer regions. The image was taken in visible light as part of the VST-ATLAS survey. The goal of the survey is to map a vast ...

22 listopada 2021: Powerful lasers leave the dome of one of the four Unit Telescopes of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory in Chile. The beams reach a layer of the atmosphere about 90 kilometres above the ground, very rich with atoms of sodium. The lasers make the sodium shine, creating artificial stars in the sky. But why? Earth’s atmosphere distorts light reaching us from cosmic objects, decreasing the sharpness of astronomical observations. This is the same reason why stars seen from Earth appear to “twinkle”. To correct observations for this effect, astronomers have developed a technology known as adaptive optics, where a flexible mirror is deformed hundreds of times per second to counteract atmospheric turbulence. However, to calculate the necessary corrections, adaptive optics need reference stars close to the observed object. Such stars are not always ideally placed, though, which made astronomers come up with the idea of using lasers ...

15 listopada 2021: Yes, the bright light you see in the centre of this picture, shining below the Milky Way’s dark, pinkish belt, is in fact the king of the planets in the Solar System! Jupiter is flanked by two hills hosting ESO’s Very Large Telescope (left) and VISTA (right) in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Jupiter is the largest planet in our Solar System and the third brightest object in the night sky, only outshone by the Moon and Venus. Naming it after the god of the sky and thunder is certainly fitting! Mainly made of hydrogen and helium, one of Jupiter’s most distinctive marks is the famous great red spot on its surface, the largest storm in the Solar System. Jupiter has been observed by the 8.2-m telescopes of the VLT on more than one occasion. The VISIR instrument captured a stunning high resolution infrared image of Jupiter, key to understanding ...

8 listopada 2021: The image shows a pair of overlapping spiral galaxies, NGC 3314a and b, in the top left, caught in a majestic cosmic dance — captured by ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST). But don’t let the perspective fool you! They are, in fact, not interacting at all. The two galaxies, located between 117 and 140 million light-years away in the constellation of Hydra, are actually physically unrelated and only appear to overlap when viewed from Earth. This unique alignment gives astronomers the opportunity to measure many properties of the galaxies, such as how dust absorbs starlight, and hence gain insight into their composition and evolution. There is another hidden secret in this picture if you look closely at the lower right region: beyond this stunning cosmic dance you will find a faint yellowish smudge, the signature of an ultra-diffuse galaxy (UDG). UDGs are objects as large as the Milky Way but ...

1 listopada 2021: The Search for habitable Planets EClipsing ULtra-cOOl Stars (SPECULOOS) telescopes sited at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert are usually the ones looking for new worlds, but this picture actually captures the observing site looking like a planet itself. This is constructed using a photography technique called stereographic projection, whereby a spherical image — like a 360º panorama — is projected onto a plane. The mission of SPECULOOS is to detect terrestrial planets as they pass between us and their parent small, cool star in the solar neighbourhood, leading to a tiny, regular dimming in the star’s brightness. Exoplanets discovered by this so-called transit method can be studied in great detail, including making precise measurements of their mass and radius, and analysing their possible atmospheres and potential for life. SPECULOOS, whose name is inspired by the sweet treat famous in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany, comprises four telescopes, each ...