Zdjęcie tygodnia

4 lutego 2019: This week’s Picture of the Week focuses on one of twenty protoplanetary discs explored and imaged by ALMA’s first Large Program, known as the Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). The disc is called AS 209, and its substructures are particularly pronounced thanks to its thin, high-contrast rings and almost face-on orientation towards us. Though concentric rings — shown here in particularly beautiful clarity — are a common substructure among such discs, their widths, separations, and number can vary greatly. It’s still unclear how these substructures form, and how planets emerge from them. Quantifying and studying these similarities and differences was a motivator for constructing ALMA, and was the main objective of DSHARP. These details may hold clues to the type of planetary system that will eventually emerge. One interpretation is that there may be a rapid and complex interplay between young protoplanets and the disc itself far ...

28 stycznia 2019: This week’s image shows 20 spectacular protoplanetary discs captured by ALMA’s first Large Program, known as the Disk Substructures at High Angular Resolution Project (DSHARP). In a focused observation effort that included hours of data collected over several months, researchers imaged 20 nearby protoplanetary discs to learn more about the earliest stages of planet formation, and the staggering quantity of data from the project has just been released. It has long been thought that planetary systems are likely to have their origins in so-called protoplanetary discs — compressed circles, spirals or ellipses of gas and dust, which form around protostars in the early stages of their development. The process by which planets emerge from these diffuse discs, however, is not well understood. It is particularly challenging to understand the very earliest stages of their evolution — when dust within a disc coalesces into planetesimals and the seeds of planets are ...

21 stycznia 2019: A star-strewn nighttime sky hangs over the Chilean landscape in this captivating photograph. A broken line of yellow lights weave their way across the dark rolling hills below. These marks the route between ESO’s Paranal Observatory, situated atop Cerro Paranal, and the Residencia, the home-from-home for astronomers, technicians and other staff working at the observatory. Designed to provide a cool refuge against the harsh conditions of the Atacama desert, the Residencia is set into a natural hollow and blends perfectly into its arid surroundings. As well as offices and rooms for visiting astronomers, this desert refuge contains a verdant garden and swimming pool set beneath a 35-m wide glass-covered dome. As befits any building near an astronomical observatory, the Residencia is designed to minimise light pollution and to preserve the exceptionally dark skies above Paranal. This image was taken by astrophotographer and ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek. A long-time collaborator ...

14 stycznia 2019: Hundreds of astronomical objects are visible in this ESO Picture of the Week, including star clusters, nebulae, dust clouds, and other galaxies — most notably the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, visible to the upper right. However, something much closer to home is vying for our attention. To the far right of the image, a silver arc streaks across the sky. This arc is actually composed of two closely-spaced lines, caused by sunlight bouncing off the antennae of two Iridium communication satellites currently orbiting the Earth. It may be empty now, but this dry, barren section of the Chilean Atacama Desert will soon be bustling with activity. The site has been selected to host the southern part of the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a remarkable array of 99 antennas that will gaze up at this incredible sky in search of high-energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are a type of electromagnetic ...

7 stycznia 2019: Nuzzled in the chest of the constellation Virgo (the Virgin) lies a beautiful cosmic gem — the galaxy Messier 61. This glittering spiral galaxy is aligned face-on towards Earth, thus presenting us with a breathtaking view of its structure. The gas and dust of the intricate spiral arms are studded with billions of stars. This galaxy is a bustling hub of activity with a rapid rate of star formation, and both a massive nuclear star cluster and a supermassive black hole buried at its heart. Messier 61 is one of the largest members of the Virgo Cluster, which is made up of more than a thousand galaxies, and is itself at the centre of the Virgo Supercluster — to which our Milky Way also belongs. This dazzling beauty was first discovered in 1779, and it has been capturing astronomers’ interest ever since. Set against a dark sky littered with galaxies, ...

31 grudnia 2018: This panorama of the landscape around ESO’s Paranal Observatory, located in the Chilean Atacama Desert, was taken by ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek. Captured at dusk, it shows the moment just after sunset, when the the sky is painted in beautiful colours of yellow, orange, red, even blue-purple, and the reddish hues of the desert below are enhanced by the soft light. This time of day is known as twilight, but is also referred to as the blue hour (named for the colour of the sky). The unique and ethereal quality of the light during blue hour has also earned it the nickname of “sweet light” amongst artists and photographers. The planet Venus stands out against the pink of the sky in the very centre of the image, while the Very Large Telescope (VLT) rests atop the mountain on the right, Cerro Paranal. The Andromeda Galaxy is faintly visible to ...

24 grudnia 2018: Few people have ever viewed the Moon through a telescope as monumental as ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Astronomers at Paranal Observatory in Chile recently enjoyed this unique opportunity when one of the telescope’s instruments, VIMOS (VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph), was decommissioned to free up a space at the UT3 telescope for the upcoming CRIRES+ (the CRyogenic InfraRed Echelle Spectrograph Upgrade Project). VIMOS was astonishingly productive; the spectrograph studied thousands of distant galaxies seen at a time when the Universe was only at a third of its current age, and mapped their distribution and physical properties. The sensitive instruments used by the VLT, including VIMOS, are designed to image dim objects billions of light-years away, and therefore objects as near and bright as our planet’s moon easily completely saturate them with far too much light. But when VIMOS was decommissioned after 16 years of service, the astronomers stationed at Paranal took ...

17 grudnia 2018: As 2018 draws to a close we send you all our very best wishes! On behalf of everyone at the European Southern Observatory, have a very merry end of the year and a fruitful start to 2019.

10 grudnia 2018: The R Aquarii system is a symbiotic binary star surrounded by a large, dynamic nebula. Such binaries contain two stars in an unequal and complex relationship — a white dwarf and a red giant. In a disquieting act of stellar cannibalism, the white dwarf is stripping matter from its larger companion. The tormented red giant and the unstable white dwarf occasionally eject matter in weird spurts, loops and trails — forming the curious shapes seen in these images. In this unusual comparison image — a rare case of dynamic evolution captured with ground-based telescopes — we see the difference 15 years can make. It may be the mere blink of an eye on a cosmic timescale, but it provides us with a wonderful opportunity to observe a truly dynamic system as it changes shape in our skies. These images show the evolution not only of R Aquarii, but also of ...

3 grudnia 2018: This spectacular Picture of the Week was produced from data gathered by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, combined with data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. It shows a cluster of stars named Westerlund 1, one of the most massive young star clusters known to reside in the Milky Way. Excitingly, it also shows the comet-like “tails” of material stretching away from some of the giant stars in Westerlund 1. Such tails are formed in the thick, relentless winds that pour from the cluster’s stellar residents, carrying material outwards. This phenomenon is similar to how comets get their famous and beautiful tails. Comet tails in the Solar System are driven away from the nucleus of their parent comet by a wind of particles that streams out from the Sun. Consequently comet tails always point away from our Sun. Similarly, the tails of the huge red stars shown ...

26 listopada 2018: This photo shows the future site of the Technical Facility for ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) — and construction is well underway! Situated at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert, this facility will be the maintenance hub for the ELT, which will take up residence on Cerro Armazones. Behind the site, ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) can be seen standing high up on Cerro Paranal. The ELT’s 39-metre primary mirror will be made up of 798 hexagonal segments, and will be controlled by a system of very-high-precision sensors. This technology, known as active optics, will allow the telescope to continually adjust each individual segment to account for disturbances such as temperature, gravity and pressure due to wind, in order to maintain the perfect shape to enable optimal observations. To maintain tip-top quality, this colossal mirror must undergo a regular process of stripping, washing, and recoating. Since each individual ...

19 listopada 2018: This colourful image shows a part of the Rosette Nebula in the constellation of Monoceros (The Unicorn). It is an emission nebula, composed of clouds of gas that are made to glow by the radiation emanating from stars within. The Rosette Nebula is a fairly typical example of an emission nebula — but typical does not mean boring! Nebulae are some of the most beautiful celestial objects out there, and they frequently show up spectacularly in images taken by astronomical telescopes, as seen here. In nebulae such as this, gas and dust are combining to produce a new generation of stars. Initially these newly-formed stars are shrouded in the dusty clouds that gave them birth, and cannot be seen in visible light. But after a while they blow away the denser material and their powerful radiation pours out to ionise the surrounding gas, causing it to glow brightly. These elements ...

12 listopada 2018: ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has captured an unprecedented series of images showing the passage of the exoplanet Beta Pictoris b around its parent star. This young massive exoplanet was initially discovered in 2008 using the NACO instrument at the VLT. The same science team since tracked the exoplanet from late 2014 until late 2016, using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument (SPHERE) — another instrument on the VLT. Beta Pictoris b then passed so close to the halo of the star that no instrument could resolve them from one another. Almost two years later, after seeming to merge into the image of the star, Beta Pictoris b has now emerged from the halo. This reappearance was captured again by SPHERE. The complete series of images, with the bright glow of the star Beta Pictoris blocked out, have been compiled to create a stunning and unique time-lapse of the long-period ...

5 listopada 2018: This once-busy eye on the sky now gazes wistfully into the heavens from its mountaintop home. Located at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, this is the dish of the now-retired Swedish-ESO Submillimetre Telescope (or SEST for short). The SEST was decommissioned in 2003 to make way for the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), both of which sit on the Chajnantor plateau in Chile’s Atacama region (as their names suggest). In its day, the SEST was the largest sub-millimetre telescope in the southern hemisphere; it notably broke new ground in the study of some of the coldest regions in the Milky Way, where stars are just beginning to form from cosmic gas and dust. The bright streak of the Milky Way rises above the SEST in this image. Within this river of light one can, poetically, see some of the huge ...

29 października 2018: The era of extremely large telescopes is beginning — and it will revolutionise our understanding of the Universe. ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is currently under construction in the remote Chilean Atacama Desert; this groundbreaking telescope alone will collect more light than over 200 NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescopes. As the name suggests, such telescopes are truly colossal. The largest primary mirrors — by which a telescope collects light — currently in operation at all of ESO’s sites are the 8.2-metre-diameter mirrors in the four Unit Telescopes comprising the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The ELT will dwarf the already impressive VLT with its vast mirror at 39 metres in diameter! However, constructing a single, science-quality mirror of such a size is simply not possible — the ELT’s primary mirror will, in fact, be a complex honeycomb arrangement of 798 tessellated hexagonal 1.4-metre mirrors. Finding a suitable place for such a structure ...

22 października 2018: This image from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) shows the area surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that lurks at the centre of the Milky Way — highlighted here with a small circle. New research has revealed exciting evidence of interstellar gas and dust orbiting the black hole at high speeds. The molecular-hydrogen-rich gas clouds which have been identified are known as molecular cloudlets, and they have never before been unambiguously detected. This image actually shows the distribution of molecules including carbon monoxide, the cloudlets’ second most abundant molecular component. The cloudlets lie 26 000 light-years away from us, orbiting fast and relatively close to the black hole, at a distance of about one light year. ALMA’s high resolution allowed scientists to detect the cloudlets, which are the products of pre-existing massive clouds rotating around the centre of our galaxy. These clouds were tidally disrupted into dense fragments ...

15 października 2018: On Saturday 13 October 2018, ESO’s Headquarters in Garching, Germany, opened its doors for ESO’s yearly Open House Day. Along with other institutes based on the science campus in Garching, ESO invited visitors to experience first-hand its work as the world’s leading ground-based astronomy organisation. This year’s Open House Day also included events at the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre, which opened in April this year. Attendees waited impatiently for the doors to open at 11:00, eager to experience all the different activities on offer. 5200 people took the opportunity to have their questions answered by experienced astronomers and to peer behind the scenes of an organisation at the forefront of astronomical research. The programme included live experiments, guided tours, an exhibition of ESO’s multiple observatories, talks from ESO scientists, and a live connection to ESO’s sites in Chile. If you participated in the Open House Day 2018 and ...

8 października 2018: This object is possibly the oldest of its kind ever catalogued: the hourglass-shaped remnant named CK Vulpeculae. Originally thought to be a nova, classifying this unusually shaped object correctly has proven challenging over the years. A number of possible explanations for its origins have been considered and discarded. It is now thought to be the result of two stars colliding — although there is still debate about what type of stars they were. CK Vulpeculae was first spotted on 20 June 1670 by French monk and astronomer Père Dom Anthelme. When it first appeared it was easily visible with the naked eye; over the subsequent two years the flare varied in brightness and disappeared and reappeared twice, before finally vanishing from view for good. During the twentieth century, astronomers came to understand that most novae could be explained by the runaway explosive behaviour and interactions between two close stars in ...

1 października 2018: Autumn has arrived, and the colours of the temperate Northern Hemisphere are slowly changing. This photo, taken by ESO Photo Ambassador‌ ​Petr Horálek, shows the two main buildings of ESO’s Headquarters in Garching, Germany, surrounded by the wondrous golden hues that announce the beginning of the season. Not all parts of the globe experience autumn; the tropics experience few changes in sunlight through the year, and polar regions lack a transitory season between summer and winter. Only northern and southern temperate regions have the chance to observe abscission, the annual shedding of leaves, for a few months each year (starting in September and March respectively). But why do tree leaves change their colours? Rather than attempting to endure the limited light levels and cold temperatures that accompany the autumnal and wintry months, so-called deciduous plants prefer to rest — and autumn represents the seasonal preparation for this period of dormancy. ...

24 września 2018: Chile’s Atacama Desert comprises over 100 000 square kilometres of arid, barren terrain. However, for astronomers working at the largest ground-based astronomical project in existence, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), some of the most important measurements occur on the scale of just a few millimetres. The ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF) sits at an altitude of 2900 metres above sea level in the Andes. From here, astronomers, technicians, and engineers can control each of ALMA’s individual 66 antennas, which are located over 2000 metres higher, at 5000 metres elevation, up on the Chajnantor plateau. Getting the antennas up to this plateau presents quite an engineering challenge. Enter Otto and Lore! These huge orange beasts — one of which is seen here — were specifically designed and built in Germany to carry the 100-tonne antennas from the OSF to Chajnantor (a distance of some 28 kilometres). When they arrive, the ...