Its orbit is shaped like a rosette and not like an ellipse as predicted by Newton's theory of gravity. This long-sought-after result was made possible by increasingly precise measurements over nearly 30 years, which have enabled scientists to unlock the mysteries of the behemoth lurking at the heart of our galaxy. This famous effect — first seen in the orbit of the planet Mercury around the Sun — was the first evidence in favor of General Relativity. One of these stars, S2, sweeps in towards the supermassive black hole to a closest distance less than 20 billion kilometers one hundred and twenty times the distance between the Sun and Earth , making it one of the closest stars ever found in orbit around the massive giant.
At its closest approach to the black hole, S2 is hurtling through space at almost three percent of the speed of light , completing an orbit once every 16 years. General Relativity provides a precise prediction of how much its orbit changes and the latest measurements from this research exactly match the theory.
This effect, known as Schwarzschild precession, had never before been measured for a star around a supermassive black hole. Because S2 takes years to orbit the supermassive black hole, it was crucial to follow the star for close to three decades, to unravel the intricacies of its orbital movement.
The team make up the GRAVITY collaboration, named after the instrument they developed for the VLT Interferometer, which combines the light of all four 8-meter VLT telescopes into a super-telescope with a resolution equivalent to that of a telescope meters in diameter.
Figure This simulation shows the orbits of stars very close to the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. One of these stars, named S2, orbits every 16 years and is passing very close to the black hole in May The ultra-hot giant exoplanet has a day side where temperatures climb above degrees Celsius, high enough to vaporise metals.
Strong winds carry iron vapor to the cooler night side where it condenses into iron droplets. Strong winds carry iron to the cooler night side where it condenses into iron droplets. He led a study, published today in the journal Nature, of this exotic exoplanet.
There, the iron encounters much cooler environments, condenses and rains down. However, it has proven to be much more versatile. Astronomy enthusiasts and scientists alike were excitedly hoping to find out more about this unprecedented dimming. Taken in visible light, the images highlight the changes occurring to the star both in brightness and in apparent shape. They have other hypotheses to explain what exactly is causing the shift in shape and brightness seen in the SPHERE images. The star also pulsates, like a beating heart, periodically changing in brightness.
These convection and pulsation changes in Betelgeuse are referred to as stellar activity. These observations were made by a team led by Pierre Kervella from the Observatory of Paris in France who explained that the wavelength of the image is similar to that detected by heat cameras. The clouds of dust, which resemble flames in the VISIR image , are formed when the star sheds its material back into space.
Modern technology has enabled us to study these objects, hundreds of light-years away, in unprecedented detail giving us the opportunity to unravel the mystery of what triggers their mass loss. Figure The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, has been undergoing unprecedented dimming. Previously, it had been assumed that stars in the so-called nuclear stellar disk had formed continuously over the past billions of years.
Instead, the new results imply a burst of star formation activity more than 8 billion years followed by a quiet period, and then another burst of activity about one billion years ago. The results have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy. The team used the broadband filters J centered at nm, in blue , H centered at nm, in green , and Ks centered at nm, in red , to cover the near infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Thanks to the new observations, astronomers have found evidence for a dramatic event in the life of the Milky Way: a burst of star formation so intense that it resulted in over a hundred thousand supernova explosions.
This initial period of star formation was followed by about six billion years during which very few stars were born. This was brought to an end by an intense burst of star formation around one billion years ago when, over a period of less than million years, stars with a combined mass possibly as high as a few tens of million Suns formed in this central region.
At present, the whole Milky Way is forming stars at a rate of about one or two solar masses per year. During a starburst, many massive stars are created; since they have shorter lifespans than lower-mass stars, they reach the end of their lives much faster, dying in violent supernova explosions.
The survey studied over three million stars, covering an area corresponding to more than 60, square light-years at the distance of the Galactic center one light-year is about 9. Bursts of star formation activity Ref.
The new timeline has consequences for a number of other astronomical phenomena. Gas flowing into the central regions of our galaxy drive both star formation and the increase in central black hole mass. The newly reconstructed star formation history indicates that our central black hole is likely to have reached most of its present mass earlier than eight billion years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of newly formed massive stars would have exploded as supernovae within millions of years.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy, with an elongated region estimated between 3, and 15, light-years long linking the inner ends of its two major spiral arms. During those quiet years, gas was evidently not funneled into the Galactic center in sufficient amounts. In the latter case, some event — like a close encounter with a dwarf galaxy — must have triggered the gas flow towards the Galactic center about one billion years ago. Reconstructing the formation history of the Galactic center.
Stars only live for a certain span of time, which depends on their mass and chemical composition. From the average brightness of stars in that clump, one can deduce the age of that group of stars. The Galactic center is very dense, with between a thousand and a hundred thousand stars in a cube with a side-length of one light-year.
When astronomers observe very dense star fields of this kind, those stellar disks will overlap in the telescope image. Separating such fields into separate stars is difficult — but necessary if you want to reconstruct the formation history of the Galactic center. Using a special technique known as holographic imaging, the astronomers were able to distinguish between stars as little as 0. With this accuracy, you could distinguish two one-cent coins viewed from a distance of more than 8 kilometers.
The study points to simultaneous merging processes during the formation of the largest galaxies in the universe. The galaxy known as NGC is known as an irregular galaxy due to its particular shape. Until now, astronomers have assumed that it was formed by the collision of two smaller galaxies and therefore contains two black holes in its core.
The galaxy system which is around million light years away from us — close by cosmic standards — has been studied in detail at all wavelengths, and has so far been regarded as a prototype for the interaction of galaxies.
Each of the three heavyweights has a mass of more than 90 million Suns. They are located in a region of space less than light-years across, i. Until now it has not been possible to explain how the largest and most massive galaxies, which we know from our cosmic environment in the "present time", were formed just by normal galaxy interaction and merging processes over the course of the previous 14 billion years approximately, ie the age of our universe.
Thanks to the sophisticated technology, images are obtained with a sharpness similar to that of the Hubble Space Telescope but additionally contain a spectrum for each image pixel. These spectra were decisive in determining the motion and masses of the supermassive black holes in NGC In the foreseeable future, signals of similar objects can be measured with the planned satellite-based gravitational wave detector LISA and further merging systems can be discovered.
Figure The irregular galaxy NGC New observations show that it harbors not two but three supermassive black holes at its core. The northern black hole N is active and was known before. The zoomed-in new high-spatial resolution image shows that the southern component consists of two supermassive black holes S1 and S2. The green color indicates the distribution of gas ionized by radiation surrounding the black holes.
The object is the fourth largest in the asteroid belt after Ceres, Vesta and Pallas. For the first time, astronomers have observed Hygiea in sufficiently high resolution to study its surface and determine its shape and size. They found that Hygiea is spherical, potentially taking the crown from Ceres as the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System.
The final requirement is that it has enough mass for its own gravity to pull it into a roughly spherical shape. This is what VLT observations have now revealed about Hygiea. Pluto , the most famous of dwarf planets, has a diameter close to km, while Ceres is close to km in size.
Hygiea is the main member of one of the largest asteroid families, with close to members that all originated from the same parent body. Astronomers expected the event that led to the formation of this numerous family to have left a large, deep mark on Hygiea. Their simulations show this violent impact, thought to have occurred about 2 billion years ago, completely shattered the parent body. Once the left-over pieces reassembled , they gave Hygiea its round shape and thousands of companion asteroids.
As an object in the main asteroid belt, Hygiea satisfies right away three of the four requirements to be classified as a dwarf planet: it orbits around the Sun, it is not a moon and, unlike a planet, it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.
The final requirement is that it have enough mass that its own gravity pulls it into a roughly spherical shape.
Vernazza et al. Since it was formed from one of the largest impacts in the history of the asteroid belt, they were expecting to find at least one large, deep impact basin, similar to the one on Vesta bottom right in the central panel. The new study also found that Hygiea is spherical, potentially taking the crown from Ceres as the smallest dwarf planet in the Solar System.
Jorda et al. Made up of dust, hydrogen, helium and traces of heavier elements, this region is the hot and energetic birthplace of new stars. The VST is one of the largest survey telescopes in the world observing the sky in visible light. Wright Keele University. Spanning about light-years from one wingtip to the other, Sh displays glowing material and dark dust lanes weaving amid bright stars. It is a beautiful example of an emission nebula , in this case an HII region , indicating active formation of new stars, which can be seen peppering this image.
Sh is both an emission nebula and a reflection nebula; much of its light is emitted by ionized gas surrounding its nascent stars, but a significant amount is also reflected from stars outside it. Spiral galaxies can contain thousands of these clouds, almost all of which are concentrated along their whirling arms. These objects are all included in the Sharpless Catalogue , a list of over clouds of glowing gas compiled by American astronomer Stewart Sharpless.
The VST is designed to photograph large areas of the sky quickly and deeply. Observations will conclude tomorrow, 11 June. Planets in the system twice the size of Earth or bigger , would be detectable with the upgraded instrumentation. But Alpha Centauri A and B remain unknown quantities; it is not clear how stable such binary star systems are for Earth-like planets, and the most promising way to establish whether they exist around these nearby stars is to attempt to observe them.
To solve this problem, in Breakthrough Watch and ESO launched a collaboration to build a special instrument called a thermal infrared coronagraph, designed to block out most of the light coming from the star and optimized to capture the infrared light emitted by the warm surface of an orbiting planet, rather than the small amount of starlight it reflects. Just as objects near to the Sun normally hidden by its glare can be seen during a total eclipse, so the coronagraph creates a kind of artificial eclipse of its target star, blocking its light and allowing much dimmer objects in its vicinity to be detected.
This marks a significant advance in observational capabilities. It will therefore be able to search for heat signatures similar to that of the Earth, which absorbs energy from the Sun and emits it in the thermal infrared wavelength range. First, it adapts the instrument for coronagraphy, enabling it to drastically reduce the light of the target star and thereby reveal the signatures of potential terrestrial planets.
Third, it employs novel chopping strategies that also reduce noise, as well as potentially allowing the instrument to switch rapidly between target stars — as fast as every milliseconds — maximizing the available telescope time.
It marks an important milestone. This telescope will let us gaze across. Figure NEAR experiment sees first light. Newly-built planet-finding instrument installed on Very Large Telescope, Chile, begins hour observation of nearby stars Alpha Centauri A and B, aiming to be first to directly image a habitable exoplanet image credit: ESO. A pre-processed and condensed package of all the data will be made available shortly after the campaign concludes. In addition, the Python-based high-contrast imaging data reduction tool PynPoint has been adapted to process NEAR data , and will be provided to members of the astronomical community who would like to use the data but do not have their own data reduction tools.
Breakthrough Watch is a global astronomical program aiming to identify and characterize planets around nearby stars. The program is run by an international team of experts in exoplanet detection and imaging. The Breakthrough Initiatives are a suite of scientific and technological programs, founded by Yuri Milner, investigating life in the Universe. Along with Breakthrough Watch, they include Breakthrough Listen, the largest ever astronomical search for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth, and Breakthrough Starshot, the first significant attempt to design and develop a space probe capable of reaching another star.
Since its orbit is well known, scientists were able to predict this fly-by and prepare the observing campaign. Figure Side by side observation and artist's impression of Asteroid KW4. The VLT is equipped with SPHERE — one of the very few instruments in the world capable of obtaining images sharp enough to distinguish the two components of the asteroid, which are separated by around 2.
It is also equipped with coronagraphs to dim the glare of bright stars, exposing faint orbiting exoplanets. In particular, it is now possible to measure whether the smaller satellite has the same composition as the larger object. At that moment, we felt that all the pain, all the efforts were worth it.
In addition, the asteroid was relatively faint and moving very fast in the sky, making these observations particularly challenging, and causing the AO system to crash several times. It was great to see our hard work pay off despite the difficulties! This cooperative effort has been ongoing since their first successful tracking of a potentially hazardous NEO in early Events will be held on five continents, and ESO will be among the major astronomical organizations taking part.
One year ago, the Gaia mission produced its much-awaited second data release, which included high-precision measurements — positions, distance and proper motions — of more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. This catalog has enabled transformational studies in many fields of astronomy, addressing the structure, origin and evolution the Milky Way and generating more than scientific publications since its launch in Note: This collaboration between ESO and ESA is just one of several cooperative projects which have benefitted from the expertise of both organizations in progressing astronomy and astrophysics.
Painstaking calibration is required to transform the observations, in which Gaia is just a speck of light among the bright stars, into meaningful orbital information. The new method allowed astronomers to measure the position of the exoplanet HR e with unprecedented accuracy. Also, the planet's spectrum was recorded as precisely as never before, paving the way for future searches for life on other planets. In general, with increasing distance, it becomes more and more difficult to image fine details of an astronomical object.
Furthermore, exoplanets are typically buried in the glare of their much brighter host stars. Now, a group of researchers led by Sylvestre Lacour of the Observatoire de Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, also including MPIA researchers, has been able to demonstrate a new method of investigation that mitigates these problems and thereby provides a new perspective on exoplanets. Using a technique known as interferometry, which exploits the wave nature of light, GRAVITY is able to combine the light of several telescopes to form a common image.
Combined, the four 8-metre-telescopes of the Very Large Telescope VLT can make images so detailed that a single telescope would need to have a mirror diameter of approximately meters to provide the same level of detail. The planet is one of only a few about out of for which direct images exist; so far, most exoplanets have only been detected indirectly.
HR e is part of a young five-body-system, a mere light-years away from us, which consists of the star HR and four planets as far as we know, at least.
All of the planets are gas giants with between 5 and 10 times the mass of Jupiter. The exoplanet was discovered in orbiting the young main-sequence star HR , which lies around light-years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus. Note: Exoplanets can be observed using many different methods. Direct methods , like the technique pioneered for this result, involve observing the planet itself instead of its effect on its parent star.
At only 30 million years old, this baby exoplanet is young enough to give scientists a window onto the formation of planets and planetary systems. This method revealed a complex exoplanetary atmosphere with clouds of iron and silicates swirling in a planet-wide storm. The technique presents unique possibilities for characterizing many of the exoplanets known today.
This paints a picture of a dynamic atmosphere of a giant exoplanet at birth, undergoing complex physical and chemical processes. Scientific instruments have come a long way since NGC was first described, and this image taken by the VLT is the most detailed portrait of this nebula ever taken.
Note 1: In John Herschel published the General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters , which built on extensive catalogues and contained entries for more than five thousand intriguing deep-sky objects. This moniker originates from its uniquely broad set of functions [2]. Note 2: In addition to being able to image large areas of the sky with precision, FORS2 can also measure the spectra of multiple objects in the night sky and analyze the polarization of their light.
Data from FORS2 are the basis of over scientific studies published every year. In case the data collected could be useful for future scientific purposes, these observations are saved and made available to astronomers through the ESO Science Archive. Figure Hidden in one of the darkest corners of the Orion constellation, this Cosmic Bat is spreading its hazy wings through interstellar space two thousand light-years away.
At only around , light-years away from the Earth, it is practically on our doorstep. These regions are stellar nurseries — and the newly formed massive stars are responsible for the ionization of the surrounding gas, which makes for a spectacular sight. The jet — named Herbig—Haro , or HH for short — is shown in detail in this accompanying image. This is the first time such a jet has been observed in visible light outside the Milky Way, as they are usually obscured by their dusty surroundings.
However, the relatively dust-free environment of the LMC allows HH to be observed at visible wavelengths. At nearly 33 light-years in length, it is one of the longest such jets ever observed. The beam is highly collimated ; it barely spreads out as it travels. Jets like this are associated with the accretion discs of their star, and can shed light on how fledgling stars gather matter.
Astronomers have found that both high- and low-mass stars launch collimated jets like HH via similar mechanisms — hinting that massive stars can form in the same way as their low-mass counterparts. The international team of astronomers was thus able to measure the mass of the black hole with unprecedented precision. This measurement confirms the fundamental assumptions of the most commonly used method to measure the mass of central black holes in distant quasars.
Studying these black holes and determining their masses is an essential ingredient to understanding galaxy evolution in general. So far, such observations had not been possible due to the small angular size of this inner region, which is about the size of our Solar system but at a distance of some 2. In the best cases, the motions of the gas can also be identified, often implying a disk in rotation. For the first time, the method was now tested experimentally and passed its test with flying colors, confirming previous mass estimates of about million solar masses for the black hole.
Thus, GRAVITY provides both a confirmation of the main method used previously to determine black hole masses in quasars and a new and highly accurate, independent method to measure such masses. It thereby promises to provide a benchmark for measuring black hole masses in thousands of other quasars.
While astronomers assume that basically all large galaxies harbor a massive black hole at their center, so far only the one in our Milky Way has been accessible for detailed studies. Figure This animation shows the zoom from an optical image of the quasar to an artistic representation of the surroundings of a supermassive black hole. There is a dusty ring of very hot material collapsing onto the gravity trap and often a jet in which material is ejected at high velocities at the poles.
Astronomers have now succeeded in spatially depicting the so-called broad line region, in which gas clouds swirl around the central black hole video credit: L. Figure Powerhouse in space: The quasar 3C resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo at a distance of about 2. The scientists believe one of the stars—about light years from Earth—is the first known candidate in the Milky Way to produce a dangerous gamma-ray burst, among the most energetic events in the universe, when it explodes and dies.
The system can be seen to be a binary, with a much fainter companion to the North of the heart of the system. This companion is not believed to play a role in the sculping of the extended dust plume, about 12 arcseconds across. One star is on the brink of a massive supernova explosion. Figure This animated gif is intended to illustrate the geometry of the structure that we have witnessed in the Apep system. From a single image, it is harder to understand the 3-D structure. The central binary only: not the wider Northern companion in the triple is illustrated as the blue star at the center.
The geometry given is that believed typical for a Wolf-Rayet colliding pinwheel system: that is an optically thin dust plume distributed over the surface of a cone that is dictated by the colliding winds.
The whole outflow structure is wrapped into a spiral by the orbital motion of the presumed central binary. Further the dust formation has a specific onset and cessation, which truncate the spiral at the outer and inner limits for example, giving rise to the notable elliptical hole.
Note this is a toy animation to illustrate a fly-around of the structure, and not a model fitted to the data that describes the dust flow process. The looping animation proceeds for about half an orbit say roughly 60 years with a pause at about the present epoch. Joe Callingham, lead author of the study, said: "We discovered this star as an outlier in a survey with a radio telescope operated by the University of Sydney.
We knew immediately we had found something quite exceptional: the luminosity across the spectrum from the radio to the infrared was off the charts. Callingham is now at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. Because the wind expands so much, it inflates the tiny coils of dust revealing the physics of the stars at the heart of the system. Benjamin Pope, a co-author from New York University, said: "The key to understanding the bizarre behavior of the wind lies in the rotation of the central stars.
Normal supernovae are already extreme events but adding rotation to the mix can really throw gasoline on the fire. Fortunately, Apep appears not to be aimed at Earth, because a strike by a gamma-ray burst from this proximity could strip ozone from the atmosphere, drastically increasing our exposure to UV light from the Sun.
However, in the meantime, it is providing astronomers a ringside seat into beautiful and dangerous physics that we have not seen before in our galaxy. The observed flares provide long-awaited confirmation that the object in the center of our galaxy is, as has long been assumed, a supermassive black hole. The closest point to a black hole that material can orbit without being irresistibly drawn inwards by the immense mass is known as the innermost stable orbit, and it is from here that the observed flares originate.
Note: The solar mass is a unit used in astronomy. It is equal to the mass of our closest star, the Sun, and has a value of 1. The discovered emission covers nearly the entire field of view — leading the team to extrapolate that almost all of the sky is invisibly glowing with Lyman-alpha emission from the early Universe.
Now, the outstanding capabilities of MUSE have allowed us to peer even deeper. The detection of Lyman-alpha emission in the HUDF is the first time astronomers have been able to see this faint emission from the gaseous envelopes of the earliest galaxies.
Note: Unit Telescope 4 of the VLT, Yepun , hosts a suite of exceptional scientific instruments and technologically advanced systems, including the Adaptive Optics Facility , which was recently awarded the Paul F.
When MUSE observes the sky, it sees the distribution of wavelengths in the light striking every pixel in its detector. Looking at the full spectrum of light from astronomical objects provides us with deep insights into the astrophysical processes occurring in the Universe. Note: The Lyman-alpha radiation that MUSE observed originates from atomic electron transitions in hydrogen atoms which radiate light with a wavelength of around nanometers.
The galaxy is inclined towards Earth, allowing astronomers to peer right into the heart of this galaxy and observe its bright center, a highly energetic region containing a supermassive black hole. Lying approximately 65 million light years from Earth, the galaxy is part of the NGC group , which also contains the well-known interacting Antennae Galaxies.
This group is part of the larger Crater Cloud, which is itself a smaller component of the Virgo Supercluster , the titanic collection of galaxies that hosts our own Milky Way galaxy.
As well as several foreground stars from our own galaxy, the Milky Way , FORS2 also captured a rogue asteroid streaking across the sky, visible as the faint line towards the top of the image.
The image was captured as part of the ESO Cosmic Gems Program, which makes use of the rare occasions when observing conditions are not suitable for gathering scientific data. It was designed to explore vast swathes of the pristine Chilean night skies, offering astronomers detailed astronomical surveys of the southern hemisphere. Note 2: Elliptical galaxies are also known as early-type galaxies, not because of their age, but because they were once thought to evolve into the more familiar spiral galaxies , an idea now known to be false.
Early-type galaxies are characterized by a smooth ellipsoidal shape and usually a lack of gas and active star formation. The bewildering diversity of shapes and types of galaxy is classified into the Hubble Sequence. It lies in the constellation of Virgo The Virgin and may at first resemble nothing but a diffuse blob. But, on closer inspection, a tenuous stream of stars and gas — a tidal tai l — can be seen stretching outwards from this elliptical galaxy.
Delicate galactic features such as tidal tails and stellar streams are hallmarks of galactic interactions, and provide vital clues to the structure and dynamics of galaxies. These stellar interlopers, such as the vividly blue HD near the center of the image, are not the intended subjects of this astronomical portrait, but happen to lie between the Earth and the distant galaxies under study. Less prominent, but no less fascinating, are the faint tracks left by asteroids in our own Solar System.
Just below NGC , the faint streak left by the asteroid TJ21 — captured over several successive observations — can be seen stretching across the image. Further to the right, another asteroid — WU69 — left its trace in this spectacular image. Even when studying the furthest reaches of the cosmos, the sensitivity of ESO telescopes and dark Chilean skies can offer entrancing observations much closer to home.
The features of the multitude of galaxies strewn across the image allow astronomers to uncover the most delicate details of galactic structure image credit: eso — Photo Release. Obscured by thick clouds of absorbing dust, the closest supermassive black hole to the Earth lies 26 light-years away at the center of the Milky Way. This gravitational monster, which has a mass four million times that of the Sun, is surrounded by a small group of stars orbiting around it at high speed.
At the closest point this star was at a distance of less than 20 billion kilometers from the black hole and moving at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometers per hour — almost three percent of the speed of light. Note 2: S2 Source 2 - a star that is located close to the radio source Sagittarius A orbits the black hole every 16 years in a highly eccentric orbit that brings it within twenty billion kilometers — times the distance from Earth to the Sun, or about four times the distance from the Sun to Neptune — at its closest approach to the black hole.
This distance corresponds to about times the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole itself. Figure Orbit diagram of S2 around the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
It was compiled from observations with ESO telescopes and instruments over a period of more than 25 years. The new results are inconsistent with Newtonian predictions and in excellent agreement with the predictions of general relativity. The observations are the culmination of a year series of ever-more-precise observations of the center of the Milky Way using ESO instruments.
Note: Observations of the center of the Milky Way must be made at longer wavelengths in this case infrared as the clouds of dust between the Earth and the central region strongly absorb visible light. Figure Cosmic swarm of bees : This simulation shows the orbits of stars very close to the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Light from the star is stretched to longer wavelengths by the very strong gravitational field of the black hole.
This is the first time that this deviation from the predictions of the simpler Newtonian theory of gravity has been observed in the motion of a star around a supermassive black hole. GRAVITY creates such sharp images that it can reveal the motion of the star from night to night as it passes close to the black hole — 26 light-years from Earth.
It was a huge challenge to develop the uniquely powerful instruments needed to make these very delicate measurements and to deploy them at the VLT in Paranal. The discovery announced today is the very exciting result of a remarkable partnership. Figure This diagram shows the motion of the star S2 as it passes close to the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The combination of exquisite image sharpness and the spectroscopic capabilities of MUSE will enable astronomers to study the properties of astronomical objects in much greater detail than was possible before.
Weilbacher AIP. But the new Narrow Field Mode using laser tomography corrects for almost all of the atmospheric turbulence above the telescope to create much sharper images, but over a smaller region of the sky. Note: Atmospheric turbulence varies with altitude; some layers cause more degradation to the light beam from stars than others.
The complex adaptive optics technique of Laser Tomography aims to correct mainly the turbulence of these atmospheric layers. The correction algorithm is then optimized for these layers to enable astronomers to reach an image quality almost as good as with a natural guide star and matching the theoretical limit of the telescope. It will enable astronomers to study in unprecedented detail fascinating objects such as supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, jets from young stars, globular clusters, supernovae, planets and their satellites in the Solar System and much more.
The same turbulence in the atmosphere that causes stars to twinkle to the naked eye results in blurred images of the Universe for large telescopes.
Light from stars and galaxies becomes distorted as it passes through our atmosphere, and astronomers must use clever technology to improve image quality artificially. Together these major developments in adaptive optics are enhancing the already powerful fleet of ESO telescopes, bringing the Universe into focus.
It shows RCW 38 and its surrounding clouds of brightly glowing gas in exquisite detail, with dark tendrils of dust threading through the bright core of this young gathering of stars. The intense radiation pouring out from these newly born stars causes the surrounding gas to glow brightly.
This is in stark contrast to the streams of cooler cosmic dust winding through the region, which glow gently in dark shades of red and orange. The contrast creates this spectacular scene — a piece of celestial artwork. Observations in the infrared, however, allow us to peer through the dust that obscures the view in the optical and delve into the heart of this star cluster. It has many scientific roles, including obtaining images of nearby galaxies or large nebulae as well as individual stars and exoplanets.
Each individual image is a combination of observations conducted at different wavelengths of light to map stellar populations and warm gas. The golden glows mainly correspond to clouds of ionized hydrogen, oxygen and sulphur gas, marking the presence of newly born stars, while the bluish regions in the background reveal the distribution of slightly older stars.
To understand this process, a team of researchers has observed various nearby galaxies with powerful telescopes on the ground and in space, scanning the different galactic regions involved in stellar births. They used MUSE to trace newborn stars and the warm gas around them, which is illuminated and heated up by the stars and acts as a smoking gun of ongoing star formation.
ALMA, which is also located in Chile, is especially well suited to mapping cold gas clouds — the parts of galaxies that provide the raw material out of which stars form.
The resulting images are stunning, offering a spectacularly colorful insight into stellar nurseries in our neighboring galaxies. And after stars are born how does their evolution influence the formation of new generations of stars? The ALMA observations, on the other hand, allowed astronomers to map around cold-gas regions across 90 nearby galaxies, producing an unprecedentedly sharp atlas of stellar nurseries in the close Universe.
The various observatories were selected to allow the team to scan our galactic neighbors at different wavelengths visible, near-infrared and radio , with each wavelength range unveiling distinct parts of the observed galaxies.
It concerns different forms of carbon in the gaseous giant planet TYC b at a distance of light years in the constellation Musca Fly. The weak signal was measured with ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile and seems to indicate that the planet is relatively rich in carbon The astronomers speculate that this is because the planet formed at a great distance from its parent star. The research will be published in the scientific journal Nature on Thursday. For example, carbon with six protons typically has six neutrons carbon , but occasionally seven carbon or eight carbon This does not change much the chemical properties of carbon, but isotopes are formed in different ways and often react slightly differently to the prevailing conditions.
Isotopes are therefore used in a wide range of research fields: from detecting cardiovascular disease or cancer to studying climate change and determining the age of fossils and rocks. The idea is that the higher carbon is somehow related to the formation of the exoplanet. Figure Isotopes In Exoplanets Explained. Twelve-year-old Kevin explains about isotopes in the atmosphere of an exoplanets, now measured by astronomers for the first time. What does this mean?
What do we learn? It will probably be the first of many. This is just the beginning. An image from December , when compared to an earlier image taken in January of the same year , showed that the stellar surface was significantly darker, especially in the southern region. By April , the star had returned to its normal brightness. The team concludes that some time before the Great Dimming, the star ejected a large gas bubble that moved away from it.
When a patch of the surface cooled down shortly after, that temperature decrease was enough for the gas to condense into solid dust. However, this new research confirms that Betelgeuse's Great Dimming was not an early sign that the star was heading towards its dramatic fate.
The dimming of Betelgeuse breaks this illusion. This is the first time heavy metals, usually associated with hot environments, have been found in the cold atmospheres of distant comets.
Each white peak in the spectrum represents a different element, with those for iron and nickel indicated by blue and orange dashes, respectively. In addition, UVES remains sensitive down to wavelengths of nm.
Most of the important iron and nickel lines appear at wavelengths of around nm, meaning that the capabilities of UVES were essential in making this discovery. Jehin, Manfroid et al. Nickel and iron vapors have now even been detected in comets observed at more than million kilometers from the Sun, more than three times the Earth-Sun distance. Material in our Solar System, for example that found in the Sun and in meteorites, usually contains about ten times more iron than nickel.
This technique allows astronomers to reveal the chemical makeup of cosmic objects: each chemical element leaves a unique signature — a set of lines — in the spectrum of the light from the objects.
Astronomers suspect that the comet most likely never passed close to a star, making it an undisturbed relic of the cloud of gas and dust it formed from. The colors in these streaks give the image some disco flair and are the result of combining observations in different wavelength bands, highlighted by the various colors in this composite image image credit: ESO, O. The team believes that the comet had never passed close to any star before it flew by the Sun in Since this technique is regularly used to study comets and other small bodies of our Solar System, this allowed the team to compare the interstellar visitor with our local comets.
Comet Hale—Bopp received much public interest in the late s as a result of being easily visible to the naked eye, and also because it was one of the most pristine comets astronomers had ever seen. Prior to its most recent passage, Hale—Bopp is thought to have passed by our Sun only once and had therefore barely been affected by solar wind and radiation. This means it was pristine, having a composition very similar to that of the cloud of gas and dust it — and the rest of the Solar System — formed from some 4.
This means it carries untarnished signatures of the cloud of gas and dust it formed from. In addition, they found that the relative amounts of carbon monoxide and water in the comet changed drastically as it neared the Sun. The team, which also includes Olivier Hainaut, says this indicates that the comet is made up of materials that formed in different places in its planetary system.
Astronomers believe that a similar process occurred early in the life of our Solar System. Originally classified as a comet, 'Oumuamua was later reclassified as an asteroid as it lacked a coma. The discovery could provide important clues to help astronomers understand the early Universe.
It is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was only about million years old image credit: ESO, M.
As the black hole consumes the surrounding gas, energy is released, allowing astronomers to spot them even when they are very far away. While more distant quasars have been discovered, this is the first time astronomers have been able to identify the telltale signatures of radio jets in a quasar this early on in the history of the Universe. Notes: [1] Radio waves that are used in astronomy have frequencies between about MHz and GHz. The jets are thought to be capable of disturbing the gas around the black hole, increasing the rate at which gas falls in.
Therefore, studying radio-loud quasars can provide important insights into how black holes in the early Universe grew to their supermassive sizes so quickly after the Big Bang. It consists of an integral field spectrometer coupled to an adaptive optics system. This allows astronomers to use the four telescopes simultaneously as a virtual m telescope achieving milli-arcsecond resolution — sharp enough to detect houses on the moon, if there were any. Further, GRAVITY can zoom onto exoplanets around nearby stars, and for example, could reveal the details of an exoplanet's atmosphere in the constellation of Pegasus.
The leader of this project is again Dr Eisenhauer. This opens up new possibilities in the search for extraterrestrial life. As the researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Communications, they found signs of a Neptune-sized planet in the Alpha Centauri star system, a mere 4.
This exoplanet is located in a zone that may offer suitable conditions for life. The team was able to collect data with unprecedented sensitivity, thus registering even very weak signals. Direct imaging of planets delivers information about the composition of their atmospheres and possibly even signs of life.
To date, however, direct measurements have mostly found exoplanets that are larger than Jupiter and orbit far away from very young host stars. In other words, these planets fall outside the habitable zone where liquid water could form.
Yet it is precisely in that range that measurements with normal telescopes are difficult, because that is where the Earth and its atmosphere are also at their brightest. This means the faint signals from exoplanets are lost in particularly strong background noise. Figure To the naked eye, Alpha Centauri is a single bright star. As second author of the study, Boehle was heavily involved in evaluating the data.
This let the scientists further reduce signal noise while examining the surroundings of both stars. To that end, we plan to combine the infrared measurements with other measurement methods. They can deduct from the light that a disk of dust and gas is orbiting around the exoplanet in which moons are possibly forming.
This is a very young planet of only 2 million years old at light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. Exoplanet DH Tau b does not resemble our Earth. The planet is at least eleven times more massive than Jupiter, the most massive planet in our solar system.
The planet is also located ten times further away from its star than our furthest planet Neptune. The planet is still glowing after its formation. As a result, it emits heat in the form of infrared radiation. This means that the light waves vibrate in a preferential direction. And that, according to the researchers, is because the infrared radiation of the planet is scattered by a disk of dust and gas that orbits the planet. In such a disk, moons may form. Figure Three images of the exoplanet DH Tau b.
The left image shows all light, both unpolarized and polarized. The middle image shows only polarized light. The right image additionally shows the direction of the polarized light. Subscribe Contact Site Map. Open Menu. Xavier Barcons Prof. Cesarsky Prof. Giacconi Prof. Woltjer Prof. Blaauw Prof. Press Releases — — — — Announcements Stars ESO New on eso. Paranal map and safety. Credit: ESO. Webcam 09 Mar CET. The VLT Trailer. Primary M1: 8. Primary M1: ZeroDur Diameter.
Secondary M2: 0. Secondary M2: Beryllium Diameter. Tertiary M3: 1. Did you know? The smallest detail distinguishable with the VLT's adaptive optics system is smaller than the size of a DVD on the International Space Station, as seen from the ground about 50 milliarcseconds.
The smallest detail distinguishable with the VLTI is about the size of a sesame seed on the International Space Station, as seen from the ground about 2 milliarcseconds.
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