Komunikaty prasowe

17 lutego 2010: After years of successful concealment, the most primitive stars outside our Milky Way galaxy have finally been unmasked. New observations using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have been used to solve an important astrophysical puzzle concerning the oldest stars in our galactic neighbourhood — which is crucial for our understanding of the earliest stars in the Universe.

10 lutego 2010: The Orion Nebula reveals many of its hidden secrets in a dramatic image taken by ESO’s new VISTA survey telescope. The telescope’s huge field of view can show the full splendour of the whole nebula and VISTA’s infrared vision also allows it to peer deeply into dusty regions that are normally hidden and expose the curious behaviour of the very active young stars buried there.

3 lutego 2010: ESO is releasing a magnificent VLT image of the giant stellar nursery surrounding NGC 3603, in which stars are continuously being born. Embedded in this scenic nebula is one of the most luminous and most compact clusters of young, massive stars in our Milky Way, which therefore serves as an excellent “local” analogue of very active star-forming regions in other galaxies. The cluster also hosts the most massive star to be “weighed” so far.

27 stycznia 2010: Astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope have detected, in another galaxy, a stellar-mass black hole much farther away than any other previously known. With a mass above fifteen times that of the Sun, this is also the second most massive stellar-mass black hole ever found. It is entwined with a star that will soon become a black hole itself.

20 stycznia 2010: ESO has just released a stunning new image of the vast cloud known as the Cat’s Paw Nebula or NGC 6334. This complex region of gas and dust, where numerous massive stars are born, lies near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, and is heavily obscured by intervening dust clouds.

13 stycznia 2010: By studying a triple planetary system that resembles a scaled-up version of our own Sun’s family of planets, astronomers have been able to obtain the first direct spectrum — the “chemical fingerprint” [1] — of a planet orbiting a distant star [2], thus bringing new insights into the planet's formation and composition. The result represents a milestone in the search for life elsewhere in the Universe.

4 stycznia 2010: Sieć ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) przeszła krok milowy decydujący o jakości obrazów, które będą znakiem rozpoznawczym tego nowego, rewolucyjnego narzędzia dla astronomii. Astronomowie i inżynierowie po raz pierwszy udanie połączyli trzy anteny obserwatorium na terenie obserwacyjnym na wysokości 5000 m n.p.m. w północnym Chile. Obecność trzech anten pracujących razem dostarcza brakującego elementu do korygowania błędów, które występują, gdy pracują jedynie dwie anteny, torując w ten sposób drogę do uzyskiwania precyzyjnych obrazów zimnego Wszechświata w niespotykanej rozdzielczości.

16 grudnia 2009: Astronomowie odkryli drugą super-Ziemię [1], dla której ustalili masę i promień, co daje istotne przesłanki co do jej struktury. To także pierwsza super-Ziemia, na której znaleziono atmosferę. Ta planeta pozasłoneczna, krążąca wokół małej gwiazdy odległej zaledwie 40 lat świetlnych od nas, otwiera dramatycznie nowe perspektywy w zadaniu poszukiwania zamieszkiwalnych światów. Planeta GJ1214b ma masę około sześć razy większą niż Ziemia, a jej wnętrze prawdopodobnie składa się z lodu wodnego. Jej powierzchnia wydaje się być naprawdę gorąca, a planeta jest otoczona przez gęstą atmosferę, co czyni ją niegościnną dla życia takiego jakie znamy na Ziemi.

11 grudnia 2009: Nowy teleskop - VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy – Widzialny i Podczerwony Teleskop do Przeglądów Astronomicznych) – właśnie rozpoczął prace w ESO w Obserwatorium Paranal i wykonał swoje pierwsze zdjęcia. VISTA to teleskop do przeglądów pracujący na falach podczerwonych. Jest największym na świecie teleskopem dedykowanym do mapowania nieba. Jego wielkie lustro, szerokie pole widzenia oraz bardzo czułe detektory ujawnią kompletnie nowy widok południowego nieba. Spektakularne nowe zdjęcia Mgławicy Płomień (Flame Nebula), centrum naszej galaktyki Drogi Mlecznej oraz Gromady Galaktyk Fornax (Piec) pokazują, że teleskop pracuje doskonale.

7 grudnia 2009: An extensive study made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope deepens a long-standing mystery in the study of stars similar to the Sun. Unusual year-long variations in the brightness of about one third of all Sun-like stars during the latter stages of their lives still remain unexplained. Over the past few decades, astronomers have offered many possible explanations, but the new, painstaking observations contradict them all and only deepen the mystery. The search for a suitable interpretation is on.

3 grudnia 2009: The young star cluster Trumpler 14 is revealed in another stunning ESO image. The amount of exquisite detail seen in this portrait, which beautifully reveals the life of a large family of stars, is due to the Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Never before has such a large patch of sky been imaged using adaptive optics [1], a technique by which astronomers are able to remove most of the atmosphere's blurring effects.

30 listopada 2009: Which come first, the supermassive black holes that frantically devour matter or the enormous galaxies where they reside? A brand new scenario has emerged from a recent set of outstanding observations of a black hole without a home: black holes may be “building” their own host galaxy. This could be the long-sought missing link to understanding why the masses of black holes are larger in galaxies that contain more stars.

25 listopada 2009: Peering through the thick dust clouds of our galaxy’s "bulge" (the myriads of stars surrounding its centre), and revealing an amazing amount of detail, a team of astronomers has unveiled an unusual mix of stars in the stellar grouping known as Terzan 5. Never observed anywhere in the bulge before, this peculiar "cocktail" of stars suggests that Terzan 5 is in fact one of the bulge's primordial building blocks, most likely the relic of a proto-galaxy that merged with the Milky Way during its very early days.

20 listopada 2009: A new technique using near-infrared images, obtained with ESO’s 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope (NTT), allows astronomers to see through the opaque dust lanes of the giant cannibal galaxy Centaurus A, unveiling its “last meal” in unprecedented detail — a smaller spiral galaxy, currently twisted and warped. This amazing image also shows thousands of star clusters, strewn like glittering gems, churning inside Centaurus A.

17 listopada 2009: Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope and its ability to obtain images as sharp as if taken from space, astronomers have made the first time-lapse movie of a rather unusual shell ejected by a “vampire star”, which in November 2000 underwent an outburst after gulping down part of its companion’s matter. This enabled astronomers to determine the distance and intrinsic brightness of the outbursting object. It appears that this double star system is a prime candidate to be one of the long-sought progenitors of the exploding stars known as Type Ia supernovae, critical for studies of dark energy.

11 listopada 2009: A ground-breaking census of 500 stars, 70 of which are known to host planets, has successfully linked the long-standing “lithium mystery” observed in the Sun to the presence of planetary systems. Using ESO’s successful HARPS spectrograph, a team of astronomers has found that Sun-like stars that host planets have destroyed their lithium much more efficiently than “planet-free” stars. This finding does not only shed light on the lack of lithium in our star, but also provides astronomers with a very efficient way of finding stars with planetary systems.

3 listopada 2009: Astronomers have tracked down a gigantic, previously unknown assembly of galaxies located almost seven billion light-years away from us. The discovery, made possible by combining two of the most powerful ground-based telescopes in the world, is the first observation of such a prominent galaxy structure in the distant Universe, providing further insight into the cosmic web and how it formed.

29 października 2009: The combination of images taken by three exceptional telescopes, the ESO Very Large Telescope on Cerro Paranal , the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla observatory and the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, has allowed the stunning Jewel Box star cluster to be seen in a whole new light.

19 października 2009: Today, at an international ESO/CAUP exoplanet conference in Porto, the team who built the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO's 3.6-metre telescope, reports on the incredible discovery of some 32 new exoplanets, cementing HARPS's position as the world’s foremost exoplanet hunter. This result also increases the number of known low-mass planets by an impressive 30%. Over the past five years HARPS has spotted more than 75 of the roughly 400 or so exoplanets now known.

14 października 2009: Today ESO announces the release of a stunning new image of one of our nearest galactic neighbours, Barnard's Galaxy, also known as NGC 6822. The galaxy contains regions of rich star formation and curious nebulae, such as the bubble clearly visible in the upper left of this remarkable vista. Astronomers classify NGC 6822 as an irregular dwarf galaxy because of its odd shape and relatively diminutive size by galactic standards. The strange shapes of these cosmic misfits help researchers understand how galaxies interact, evolve and occasionally "cannibalise" each other, leaving behind radiant, star-filled scraps.