Announcements

29 October 2021: Twenty years ago today, light from two of the 8.2-metre Unit Telescopes (UTs) of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile was combined for the first time. The event marked the historic moment when these telescopes first operated as a true interferometer, sparking the beginning of a new era for astronomy. When the light beams of the two UTs were combined on the night of 29 October 2001, the VLTI did not only successfully start its operations, but also delivered its first scientific results: the measurement of the size of the southern star Achernar, which was found to be approximately ten times larger than our Sun. This was followed by three more nights of scientific observations, where the VLTI showcased its excellent potential by measuring ten more stars, and notably performing the first interferometric observation of the intriguing Eta Carinae. The successful concept of the VLTI ...

6 October 2021: The largest adaptive mirror ever built, the M4 mirror for ESO’s upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), has reached an important milestone in its development: all six petal-shaped segments that make up the mirror are now completed. M4, the fourth mirror in the light path of the telescope, can change shape quickly and very precisely, and is a key part of the ELT’s adaptive optics system. Light from cosmic objects is distorted by our planet’s atmosphere, producing blurred images. To correct for these distortions, the ELT will use advanced adaptive-optics hardware and software, some of which has been specially developed for the telescope. This includes powerful lasers that create artificial reference stars when there aren’t stars bright enough close to the object of interest to allow measurements of atmospheric distortions, and fast and accurate sensing cameras that measure these distortions. The measurements are then passed to extremely fast real-time computers that ...

1 October 2021: Ten years ago, the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), an international observatory in which ESO is a partner, officially opened to astronomers. The occasion was marked on 3 October 2011 with the release of the first image taken with the array — of the colliding Antennae Galaxies — showcasing ALMA’s potential and heralding the start of a successful decade of astronomy. Located on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile at an elevation of 5000 metres, the array was operating with only a third of its 66 movable antennas when it first opened for scientific observations. Nonetheless, ALMA received over 900 observing proposals, with around 100 being selected, showing just how excited the scientific community were to make use of this new facility. Over the past decade, ALMA has continued to be in high demand for astronomers around the world: observing proposals still far outstrip the available time, and many interesting ...

8 September 2021: First light has been achieved for a new set of receivers installed on the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA), in which ESO is a partner. The band 1 receivers pick up radio waves between 6 and 8.5 mm in length, setting a new record for the longest wavelengths that ALMA can observe. They will allow astronomers to view the early, distant Universe and to explore how planets form as never before. To capture radiation from cosmic sources over a broad range of wavelengths, ALMA’s 66 antennas, located on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile, are equipped with precisely tuned receivers. Each receiver type is sensitive to a particular "band" or range of wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Until recently, eight out of a planned ten receivers had been mounted on the antennas, covering altogether the window between 0.3 and 3.6 mm (bands 10 to 3). Now, thanks to band 1 receivers, ...

31 August 2021: A powerful experimental laser, based on ESO technology, passed a key test last month at the Allgäuer VolksSternwarte Ottobeuren observatory in Germany. The adaptive-optics laser, developed in collaboration with industry, has important additional capabilities compared to existing systems. It will be part of the CaNaPy Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics system set to be installed at the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Optical Ground Station in Tenerife, Spain, in the frame of the ESO–ESA Research & Development collaboration. The higher laser power, nearly three times higher than in current systems, opens the door for developments in laser satellite communication, as well as significant improvements in the sharpness of astronomical images taken with ground-based telescopes. Astronomical adaptive optics refers to systems on ground-based telescopes that correct for the blurring effect brought about by turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere — the same effect that causes stars seen from Earth to “twinkle”. To remove ...

6 July 2021: An exciting new instrument, a spectrometer called CONCERTO, has successfully produced its first observations: test images of the Cat's Paw Nebula and the Crab Nebula. The instrument, installed on the ESO-operated Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX), will help astronomers probe the mysterious, ancient cosmic epoch during which the first stars lit up. The main goal of CONCERTO, which stands for CarbON CII line in post-rEionisation and ReionisaTiOn epoch, is to study the birth of the first generation of stars. To do so, it will look at cosmic objects that formed between 600 million and 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This era, known as cosmic reionisation, is poorly understood yet crucial in the history of the cosmos, as it marks the transition between the “dark ages” — a very obscure period in the life of the Universe in which stars had not formed yet — and the time when the ...

1 July 2021: The ESO Annual Report 2020 is now available. It presents a summary of ESO’s many activities throughout the year. The contents include: The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on ESO, including safety measures and the impact on staff; The ramp-down of the observatories into “Safe State” in March and the ramp-up which began in September, enabling science data from Paranal, APEX and La Silla to flow again; Work that continued in the laboratories under strict safety measures, providing crucial contributions to projects, as well as progress on design, software, data-related and other projects; Further progress made both at ESO and in industry on the Extremely Large Telescope, on the Paranal Instrumentation Programme, and on ALMA development projects; How scientific exploitation of ESO data continued to flourish during the year. Among the highlights was the confirmation of the predictions of General Relativity regarding the orbital precession of the star S2 around ...

11 June 2021: Preparations are being put in place to resume construction work on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) at Cerro Armazones in Chile, following disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the closure of the site in mid-2020. As work on manufacturing and design elements of the ELT in Europe progressed steadily, the evolution of this complex and ambitious project, set to revolutionise modern astronomy, has been closely monitored over the past year. ESO’s ELT is now expected to deliver the first scientific observations in September 2027, about half a year after an initial “telescope technical first light”. In the last few weeks, the Italian consortium ACe (Cimolai, Astaldi) in charge of the dome and main structure construction, has started preparations to resume on-site activities on ESO’s ELT in the Chilean Atacama Desert, within the health and safety restrictions established by the country’s authorities. With this important return to work in ...

1 June 2021: Today, ESO signed an agreement with an international consortium to build and operate MAVIS, a unique instrument to be installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) that will provide images up to three times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. MAVIS will tackle a range of research questions, from how the first stars formed 13 billion years ago to how weather changes on the planets and moons of the Solar System. “MAVIS will be a powerful instrument that will serve a very large number of key science projects,” explains François Rigaut, a professor at the Australian National University who is leading the consortium for MAVIS. “This will include observations of our own Solar System as well as planets around other stars, and the physics of star formation, from the Milky Way to the first star clusters in the Universe.” MAVIS, which stands for Multi-conjugate-adaptive-optics-Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph, will produce ...

20 May 2021: ESO observatories operated under challenging conditions in 2020 due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, having to reduce and even pause scientific observations for a few months. Nonetheless, 2020 was still a very productive year for the observatory with regard to the number of papers that were published using data from ESO telescopes, mostly obtained in previous years. A recently published report from the ESO library shows that 2020 represents the fourth consecutive year that over 1000 scientific studies using ESO data were published. The majority of these publications, more than 600, used data from ESO’s flagship facility, the Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the VLT Interferometer (VLTI). Highlights include the first ever image of a multi-planet system around a Sun-like star and observing a star “dance” around a supermassive black hole. Of the 608 studies carried out using observations from the VLT and VLTI, 336 (55%) used data from the ...

31 March 2021: The European Southern Observatory (ESO) has become a partner in a new project, launched last week, that has formed Europe’s largest ground-based astronomy network — the Opticon-RadioNet Pilot (ORP). This network fosters the collaboration of 37 institutions, including ESO, from Europe, Australia and South Africa. Within the ORP, ESO will drive knowledge transfer by organising a broad suite of training programmes for the European astronomy community, which will include observing schools across European observatories, as well as archival, instrumentation, and proposal writing workshops. In the long term, ESO will also help the ORP develop strategies to promote equal-opportunity policies and actions in the astronomy community. With 15 million EUR of funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, the ORP merges two existing astronomy networks (Opticon and RadioNet) to bring together several telescopes and arrays from around the world, providing European astronomers access to a wide range ...

2 March 2021: The latest edition of ESO's journal, The Messenger, is now available online. This is a special issue dedicated to the instrumentation programme for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). Selecting instruments for any telescope is a crucial step, making sure that the astronomical community it serves can undertake the scientific projects for which the telescope was designed. ESO has been working with its community of astronomers and instrument builders to establish the sequence in which the instruments planned for the ELT will be built and delivered to the observatory. This edition of The Messenger provides a status overview of the ELT instrumentation programme. Highlights from this special issue: Instrumentation for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope SUPER — AGN Feedback at Cosmic Noon Mapping the Youngest and Most Massive Stars in the Tarantula Nebula with MUSE-NFM Download The Messenger in PDF format or visit The Messenger website to subscribe and receive a free ...

1 February 2021: Since its first light in 2006, the high-resolution infrared CRIRES spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has made a number of exciting scientific discoveries. The new and improved CRIRES+, which has now seen first light, will develop the work of its predecessor and search for potentially habitable super-Earth exoplanets. CRIRES+, an instrument built by ESO in collaboration with a consortium of European institutes, will search the sky for super-Earths located within the habitable zones of nearby low-mass stars, the range of planetary orbits within which scientists believe a planet can support life. These types of planets are difficult to detect due to their relatively low masses. With CRIRES+, scientists will be better equipped to search for these super-Earths as they will be able to survey most stars in our stellar neighbourhood. Other science goals of CRIRES+ include studying the atmosphere of transiting exoplanets and the origin and evolution of ...

22 January 2021: The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a testament to research, innovation, and collaboration in Europe with a far reaching and invaluable impact on society. The new publication “ESO’s Benefits to Society” explores ESO’s contributions to its Member States across five areas: science and engineering, economy and innovation, talent development, education and outreach, and international collaboration and policy. In science and engineering, ESO and its telescopes have been instrumental in several ground-breaking discoveries. In 2020, for example, a Physics Nobel Prize was awarded for research on the Milky Way’s black hole done with ESO telescopes. ESO enables discoveries such as this by constructing and operating world-leading observatories, which push the boundaries of engineering. ESO innovations extend beyond the organisation’s remit; for example, techniques from MUSE, an instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, are being transferred for use in medicine and cancer diagnostics. ESO additionally provides economic benefits to society. In 2019, ...

14 January 2021: ESO has launched a new website to deliver a wealth of information about its Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), a forthcoming observatory that will study the Universe from Chile’s Atacama Desert. Created for a wide range of audiences, the general public and astronomy experts alike can dive into the website to discover the new telescope, its instruments, and how it will further our knowledge of the cosmos. The website showcases some of the most important scientific questions that astronomers hope the ELT will answer, complemented by striking visuals of the telescope, its surrounding structure and its various instruments and mirrors. It also features interesting facts about the ELT, which will be the largest visible and infrared light telescope in the world with a 39-metre main mirror, some of the history behind this ambitious and challenging telescope, as well as a timeline with some of the project’s most important milestones. This is ...

16 December 2020: On Friday 11 December, ESO Director General Xavier Barcons received the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins Grand Cross, at a ceremony chaired by Carolina Valdivia, the Chilean Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs. The Order Bernardo O’Higgins is a recognition by the Chilean State for foreign citizens’ outstanding work in the fields of art, science, education, industry, commerce or humanitarian or social cooperation. During the ceremony, held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Barcons received the award for paving new ways towards a deeper understanding between Chile and ESO. “On behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I would like to extend our sincere thanks for your collaboration and for helping us boost the establishment of a new astronomical paradigm in our country that is based on a regional, fair, inclusive and citizen-oriented approach. This includes cutting edge cooperation agreements, through which Chile –with its National Research and Development Agency– and ESO can ...

8 December 2020: Linda Tacconi, a senior astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany, has been elected as the next president of ESO’s main governing body, the Council. “I am honoured to have been chosen as president of the ESO Council,” Tacconi says. “The coming years represent a very exciting time for the organisation, as the first light of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope approaches and current facilities, such as ESO’s Very Large Telescope, continue at the forefront of astronomical research. The various ESO observatories will work in synergy, furthering our knowledge of the Universe and strengthening ESO’s position as a world-leader in ground-based astronomy. I look forward to sharing in this experience and working with Council to support ESO in maintaining this leadership role.” Tacconi completed her PhD at the University of Massachusetts, USA, in 1988 and later worked at the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy, ...

4 December 2020: The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), ESO’s new flagship telescope being built to answer the biggest questions about our Universe, has received a 10% increase to its budget. The funding boost approved by the ESO Council — the organisation’s main governing body — brings the total cost of the project to €1.3 billion. The 39-metre telescope, being erected in Cerro Armazones near ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile, will start operating later this decade. “Council’s decision means ESO has the funds to build an ambitious and extremely powerful science machine, fully integrated with ESO’s Paranal Observatory, that meets the longer-term aspirations of the astronomy community,” says ESO Director General Xavier Barcons. Overall, 80% of the ELT’s budget is being invested in contracts with industry in ESO member states and in Chile. The funding boost will strengthen the scientific capabilities of the under-construction telescope, bringing them in line with those envisioned in ...

3 December 2020: To strengthen its cooperation with Chile, ESO provides and manages an annual fund that awards projects dedicated to the development of science research, technology and education in astronomy. The Joint Committee ESO–Chile 2020 has now selected 15 projects fitting these criteria, awarding a total of 460 million Chilean pesos (about €500 000). The funds will support postdoctoral programmes in astronomy at Chilean academic institutions, scientific visits for researchers, academic faculty positions, the construction of technological systems for astronomy, as well as educational programmes for the teaching and dissemination of astronomy. Created in 1996, the Joint Committee ESO–Chile brings together representatives of ESO and the Chilean Government, through the Energy, Science and Technology & Innovation Division (DECYTI) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MINREL), and with the participation of the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development (ANID), and the Chilean Astronomical Society (SOCHIAS). The Joint Committee ESO–Chile has made a ...

24 November 2020: M1, the main mirror of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), is moving closer to completion with the approval of the final design for its edge sensors, with its positions actuators also nearing this key milestone. The sensors and actuators are crucial to the optical quality and functionality of the giant 39-metre mirror. The ELT is planned to start operating later this decade in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The primary mirror on the ELT, M1, is composed of 798 hexagonal segments, made of a thin glass-ceramic material. To ensure the optical quality of the mirror, its segments have to work together to maintain the mirror’s shape, despite changes in the telescope's position and in external conditions, such as temperature, pressure and wind. Movable supports and sensors for the mirror, namely the M1 position actuators and edge sensors, allow each mirror segment to move independently and with nanometric (1 millionth of a ...