Announcements 2019

23 December 2019: The latest edition of ESO's quarterly journal, The Messenger, is now available online. Find out the latest news from ESO on topics ranging from new instruments to the latest science discoveries. Highlights of this edition include: ELT M4 — The Largest Adaptive Mirror Ever Built : Vernet et al. NEAR — The Search for Low-Mass Planets in α Cen: Kasper et al. GRAVITY Science: GRAVITY Collaboration et al. The ESO Summer Research Programme 2019: Manara et al. Download The Messenger in PDF format or visit The Messenger website to subscribe and receive a free printed copy. The printed version will be distributed after 17 January 2020. This product is also available in the ESOshop.

23 December 2019: Starting on 2 February 2020, the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre invites you to an immersive extravaganza touring the Solar System: The Planets 360. The inaugural screening of the show will take place on the first weekend when the ESO Supernova opens its doors again after its brief intermission in January. A slight departure from our usual features in the planetarium but no less impressive, The Planets 360 planetarium show is driven by a recording of Holst’s The Planets suite performed by the 132-piece UK Philharmonia Orchestra accompanied by magnificent Solar System visuals featuring the latest images that have been captured by robotic explorers. Science, music and art fuse into a 360° spectacle that brings the Solar System to life. Follow the journeys of space probes as you soar to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and other planets, all the while enjoying musical interpretations of each one. You can reserve a ...

19 December 2019: Several space companies are developing plans for constellations of satellites to put in relatively low Earth orbits, for a variety of communication purposes. The recent launches of multiple batches of satellites for Space X’s Starlink project have drawn public and media attention, particularly as a result of the satellites’ high visibility immediately after launch. The astronomy community has raised concerns about the impact of these constellations on scientific research. In coordination with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the American Astronomical Society (AAS), and the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), ESO and other observatories are evaluating the effects that these satellite constellations will have on ground-based optical and infrared astronomical observations. The calculations will soon be made public after undergoing independent peer review. Satellite constellations will have an impact on radio, millimetre and submillimetre observatories, including the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX). ESO has an observer ...

2 December 2019: As we carry out maintenance work and take some time to prepare for the year ahead, the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre will be closed during the first month of the New Year. We will reopen on Saturday 1 February 2020 and look forward to welcoming our visitors. The centre will not be open for visits or events, neither to the general public nor to private entities in January. We will be closed from 23 December until 7 January, as part of the regular winter holidays, and then we will continue to be closed from 8 January until 31 January. Activities will recommence on Saturday 1 February 2020, when our regular planetarium shows, guided tours, and educational workshops will resume. And also look out for some new shows and special events. Reservations for shows will remain open online and you can already book all our standard planetarium shows and ...

2 December 2019: ESO has signed a contract with SENER Aerospacial for the design and production of the support cell for the M5 mirror of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). SENER Aeroespacial will carry out the design, construction and verification of the cell for the M5 mirror, as well as its control system and auxiliary equipment. This complex mechanism has critical performances in terms of accuracy to ensure the stability of the flat elliptical mirror M5. The contract was signed on 29 November 2019 at ESO’s headquarters in Garching bei München in Germany by ESO’s Director General Xavier Barcons and the General Director of SENER Aeroespacial José Julián Echevarría. The ceremony was also attended by the Vice-Consul of Spain in Munich María Gonzalo Villanueva, representatives from the Spanish Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology, the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, as well as by staff members of ESO and SENER ...

14 November 2019: This winter, the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre has a special addition to its programme: the show Enlightening Time Travel. Screening only 4 times during the month of December, the show takes you on a journey to the extremes of space, time, and energy, offering answers to questions such as: How did ancient cultures experience the impressive night sky? How did this impression change with the advent of the European Southern Observatory’s most advanced telescopes? Which stories were told back then, and which ones are today? During the one-hour planetarium show, settle down to wonder at the quiet sense of magic of the Universe, as it was felt thousands of years ago by ancient cultures and religions and as it is revealed now by the astronomers and engineers of the European Southern Observatory (ESO). This special planetarium show will be shown between 1 and 22 December 2019. To reserve ...

12 November 2019: Reservations are now open for the ESO Supernova planetarium shows happening during the first half of 2020. If you are looking to plan your visit to the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre during the first half of 2020, reservations are now open online for all our standard planetarium shows, happening from February to June. New planetarium shows will be screened at our centre in 2020, but those will be announced separately as they enter our programme. Sign up for our newsletter to be the first to find out about special events and new shows. The ticket for a planetarium show costs €5/person, and the ticket for a guided tour costs €8/person. For public evening events, please consult our programme, as prices vary. In January, our centre will be closed for maintenance and to take some time to prepare for the year ahead. We will be closed from 23 December ...

5 November 2019: ESO is taking important steps to make its revolutionary new ground-based telescope greener. Next year, a power conditioning system and a photovoltaic plant will be installed at the site of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) with operations of both systems starting 2 years later. One of the biggest challenges in the construction of ESO’s ELT in Cerro Armazones, Antofagasta, Chile, is to ensure access to a clean and highly reliable electrical supply. Since the telescope is located close to areas that receive some of the highest amounts of solar radiation in the world, this goal can be achieved by installing and operating a power conditioning system to the grid supply and a photovoltaic plant, independent from the grid generator. Today, ESO signed a contract with the company SAESA to install and operate both facilities. The electrical power conditioning system will provide highly reliable electricity, will have full backup capacity, and ...

4 November 2019: 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, teaching materials and projects in science education, interviews with inspiring scientists and teachers and many other useful resources for science teachers. It aims to promote science teaching by encouraging communication between teachers, scientists and others involved in European science education. Highlights of this issue include: an article answering the question of whether plants suffer from jet lag; a look behind the scenes at one of Europe’s largest laboratories to explore the different roles that make life-changing research happen; and an overview of ESA’s space science challenges for the new school year in the News from EIROs section. Teaching activities include: a visually exciting experiment to work out the empirical formula of a chemical compound; an activity to test the effectiveness ...

28 October 2019: Is it Pac-Man trying to swallow the Moon or a fortuitous photo of one of our VLT Auxiliary telescopes on the cover of the 2020 ESO Calendar? The calendar, which is available in the ESOshop, has 12 images — a selection of our best photos of the cosmos and our telescopes against the stunning Chilean landscape — which will accompany you throughout the year. For the month of March, you can enjoy the breathtaking Milky Way over the site of the biggest eye on the sky, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. Just imagine what this place will look like in 2025 when the giant, 40-metre class telescope is ready to uncover some of the mysteries of the Universe that can only be tackled with a facility of this size. The month of July brings you a composite image of the phases of the 2019 Total Solar Eclipse from ESO’s La Silla ...

23 October 2019: Recent developments in Chile have led to disruptions of some services, including transportation and flight cancellations, affecting the normal function of some Chilean cities. ESO is monitoring the situation closely and has implemented measures to continue to ensure the well-being of its staff and visitors. ESO travel to and within Chile has been limited, and this may have an impact on ESO operations in Vitacura, La Silla, Paranal and APEX.

22 October 2019: On 2 July 2019, a total solar eclipse was visible over ESO’s La Silla Observatory, located in the Chilean Atacama Desert. Total solar eclipses are rare phenomena that occur in a specific location once every 360 years on average and have a big impact on the people that witness them. Even more rare is for total solar eclipses to occur over existing observatories, which allows for special science experiments to take place. For this reason, ESO invited over 25 scientists, communicators and educators to observe and document the event from La Silla Observatory. The experiments conducted by the invited participants enabled some fantastic results, such as mapping the polarisation of the Sun’s corona and analysing its spectra. To celebrate this impressive occurrence, ESO has released a new video podcast, ESOcast 209. Watch it to revisit the total solar eclipse at La Silla and find out how astronomers have used this ...

21 October 2019: The latest edition of ESO's quarterly journal, The Messenger, is now available online. Find out the latest news from ESO on topics ranging from astronomical events to the latest science discoveries. Highlights of this edition include: Distributed Peer Review: F. Patat et al. M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results and the Role of ALMA: C. Goddi et al. The PHANGS Surveys: E. Schinnerer et al. Total Solar Eclipse Over La Silla: L. Ventura et al. Download The Messenger in PDF format or visit The Messenger website to subscribe and receive a free printed copy. This product is also available in the ESOshop.

14 October 2019: ESO astronomer Leonardo Testi together with Patrick Hennebelle from CEA Paris-Saclay in France, Ralf Klessen from the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and Sergio Molinari from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Rome, Italy, were awarded with up to €12.6 million by the European Research Council (ERC) for the project "ECOGAL – Understanding our Galactic ecosystem: From the disk of the Milky Way to the formation sites of stars and planets". This project is one of only 37 synergy grants to be funded by the ERC in 2019 and the only one in the field of astronomy. The ECOGAL project unites four research groups in Europe at the forefront in observational astronomy, numerical astrophysics, instrument development, and astroinformatics. The ERC grant funding will create about 30 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and other staff in the grantees' research team over the six years project duration. The primary science goal ...

10 October 2019: The third edition of the ProChile Innovation Summit chose Munich for its first European edition, held on 9 and 10 October. Focused on the digital economy, the event sought to materialise cooperation and business opportunities between Chile and Germany, mainly on issues related to Big Data, logistics, e-mobility, digital health, design and sustainable materials. The event was attended by important companies, such as Microsoft, Siemens, BMW and IBM, who used the occasion to share their innovation projects in Chile. During the first day of activities, ESO received summit guests at the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre, located at the Headquarters of ESO in Garching bei München. On this occasion, the ESO Director General, Xavier Barcons, addressed officials and guests, including the Chilean Ambassador to Germany, Cecilia MacKenna, and ProChile Director General, Jorge O’Ryan, mentioning Chile’s strategic role in furthering state-of-the-art astronomy. The ProChile Director General, Jorge O’Ryan Schütz said: ...

8 October 2019: Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star. Mayor, Professor Emeritus at Geneva University in Switzerland, and Queloz, Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK, share the prize "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth's place in the cosmos" with James Peebles, Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science at Princeton University, US. “ESO is really proud of the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for having pioneered a new field in astronomy with the discovery of 51 Pegasi b and many more exoplanets after.” says ESO Director General Xavier Barcons. “The partnership that ESO cultivates with research institutions in the Member States for the development of the most challenging instruments has been key to enable many of these discoveries. In ...

30 September 2019: The newest addition to the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre’s programme, the show Out There — The Quest for Extrasolar Worlds, invites you to discover humanity’s quest for life on other planets, as we try to understand whether life in the Universe is the norm or the exception. Are you curious to learn how science caught up with fiction, what planets we first explored and how we discover new extrasolar planets nowadays? Then book your place at a show starting on 28 October 2019, in either German or English. For thousands of years, mankind thought that the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Thanks to our curiosity, imagination and urge to explore, we now know that planets around stars are nothing special in the cosmos. The Sun is just one ordinary star among hundreds of billions in our galaxy, the Milky Way. With the world’s most powerful telescopes ...

27 September 2019: Construction is now underway of the foundation of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the remote Chilean Atacama Desert. Once complete, the telescope will be the largest ground-based telescope in operation, weighing in at 3400 tonnes. The ELT is a reflecting, fully-steerable telescope. The design includes a segmented primary mirror measuring 39.3 metres in diameter, a secondary mirror (4.2 metres in diameter) and a tertiary mirror (3.75 metres in diameter). The telescope will also feature groundbreaking adaptive optics technology that will help correct the distortions in Earth’s atmosphere, making the images sharper than those taken from space. The enclosure itself will be a classic dome shape and will be the telescope’s first defence against the elements. The dome height comes in at nearly 74 metres from the ground and it will span 86 metres in diameter. Since the ELT is the largest telescope ever built to date — the question ...

24 September 2019: The 2019 winners of the prestigious European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) have been announced. Since 1989 the EUCYS has aimed to promote cooperation and interchange between young scientists and to guide their future careers in science and technology. This year celebrated the 31st year of the competition, with more than 150 young scientists coming from 39 countries around the world competing in Sofia, Bulgaria. The EUCYS 2019 Jury comprised 19 expert judges with a wide range of scientific experience. The four first prizes of the EUCYS 2019 competition were presented by the Bulgarian Minister of Education and Science, Krasimir Valchev and Signe Ratso, the European Commission's Deputy Director General for Research, Science and Innovation. The prizes each consisted of €7,000 and were awarded to: Adam Kelly from Ireland for “Optimised Simulation of General Quantum Circuits” Magnus Quaade Oddershede from Denmark for “The Wingtip's Influence on the Efficiency of ...

13 September 2019: ESO Fellow Chris Harrison has led a project to design and produce an astronomical show aimed at people who are blind or visually impaired. A Dark Tour of the Universe offers a tactile experience of the Universe by using 3D models of astronomical images and sonification of real astronomical datasets. The show premieres at the British Science Festival on 13 September 2019. The show starts with stars appearing as they are from the platform of ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, on the night of 13 September 2019. Using real data of position, magnitudes and colours of stars, a beautiful surround-sound effect is created, allowing the audience to listen to the stars appear. Other highlights of the show include listening to variable stars and to galaxies merging, and feeling 3D models of some of ESO’s best astronomical images, including the first picture of a black hole and the 360-degree panoramic ...