Category: European Southern Observatory
"Matter is not distributed uniformly in the Universe," says Masayuki Tanaka from ESO, who led the new study.
Star clusters are among the most visually alluring and astrophysically fascinating objects in the sky.
This 34 by 20-degree wide image provides us with a view as experienced by amateur astronomers around the world. However, its incredible beauty and appeal owe much to the quality of the observing site and the skills of Stéphane Guisard, the world-renowned astrophotographer, who is also an ESO engineer.
The first of three images of ESO's GigaGalaxy Zoom project -- a new magnificent 800-million-pixel panorama of the entire sky as seen from ESO's observing sites in Chile -- has just been released online. The project allows stargazers to explore and experience the Universe as it is seen with the unaided eye from the darkest and best viewing locations in the world.
Smouldering several thousand light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), the Trifid Nebula presents a compelling portrait of the early stages of a star's life, from gestation to first light.
The new image, showing a very rich field of stars towards the Carina arm of the Milky Way, is centred on the star HD 87643, a member of the exotic class of B[e] stars [1]. It is part of a set of observations that provide astronomers with the best ever picture of a B[e] star.
Located 7000 light-years away, towards the constellation of Serpens (the Snake), the Eagle Nebula is a dazzling stellar nursery, a region of gas and dust where young stars are currently being formed and where a cluster of massive, hot stars, NGC 6611, has just been born.
"The performance of this breakthrough camera is without an equivalent anywhere in the world. The camera will enable great leaps forward in many areas of the study of the Universe," says Norbert Hubin, head of the Adaptive Optics department at ESO. OCam will be part of the second-generation VLT instrument SPHERE.
The massive Arches Cluster is a rather peculiar star cluster. It is located 25 000 light-years away towards the constellation of Sagittarius (the Archer), and contains about a thousand young, massive stars, less than 2.5 million years old [1].
Today, September 29, 2004, is undisputedly the Day of Toutatis, the famous ''doomsday'' asteroid. Not since the year 1353 did this impressive ''space rock'' pass so close by the Earth as it does today. Visible as a fast-moving faint point of light in the southern skies, it approaches the Earth to within 1,550,000 km, or just four times the distance of the Moon. Closely watched by astronomers since its discovery in January 1989, this asteroid has been found to move in an orbit that brings it close to the Earth at regular intervals, about once every four years.
Observations by an international team of astronomers have thrown new light on the earliest epoch of the Milky Way galaxy. The first-ever measurement of the Beryllium content in two stars in a globular cluster - pushing current astronomical technology towards the limit - has made it possible to study the early phase between the formation of the first generation of stars in the Milky Way and that of this stellar cluster. The new observations thus indicate that the first generation of stars in the Milky Way galaxy formed soon after the end of the ~200 million-year long "Dark Ages" that succeeded the Big Bang.
Real geodes are handball-sized, hollow rocks that start out as bubbles in volcanic or sedimentary rock. Only when these inconspicuous round rocks are split in half by a geologist, do we get a chance to appreciate the inside of the rock cavity that is lined with crystals. In the case of Hubble's 35 light-year diameter 'celestial geode' the transparency of its bubble-like cavity of interstellar gas and dust reveals the treasures of its interior.
A popular saying states that when you see a meteor, you may make a wish. While astronomers cannot promise that it will be realised, a team of astronomers have indeed seen a dream come true! On May 12, 2002, they were lucky to record the spectrum of a bright meteor when it happened - by sheer chance and against all reasonable odds - to cross the narrow slit of the FORS1 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope.
For many years astronomical images from the world's telescopes were reserved for an elite of astronomers and technical people. Now anyone with a desktop computer running Adobe Photoshop software can try their hand at crafting astronomical images as beautiful as those from the Hubble Space Telescope. A free software plug-in, released today, makes a treasure trove of archival astronomical images and spectra from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope, the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and many other famous telescopes accessible to home astronomy enthusiasts.
Current theories of the formation of galaxies are based on the hierarchical merging of smaller entities into larger and larger structures, starting from about the size of a stellar globular cluster and ending with clusters of galaxies. According to this scenario, it is assumed that no massive galaxies existed in the young universe. However, this view may now have to be revised.
