A team of astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile have found evidence of another planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Solar System. This candidate planet is the third detected in the system and the lightest yet discovered orbiting this star. At just a quarter of […]
Invisible object has two companion stars visible to the naked eye PR Image eso2007a Artist’s impression of the triple system with the closest black hole A team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutes has discovered a black hole lying just 1000 light-years from Earth. The black hole is closer to […]
Photo: ESO’s Very Large Telescope’s Sphere instrument obtain the sharpest images of a double asteroid as it flew by Earth on 25 May. The left-hand image shows SPHERE observations of Asteroid 1999 KW4, artist impression right. Image-ESO VLT observes a passing double asteroid hurtling by Earth at 44,000 MPH The International Asteroid Warning Network (IAWN) […]
Astronomers have used observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) to determine that star formation in the very distant galaxy MACS1149-JD1 started at an unexpectedly early stage, only 250 million years after the Big Bang. This discovery also represents the most distant oxygen ever detected in the Universe […]
Astronomers have used the ALMA and IRAM telescopes to make the first direct measurement of the temperature of the large dust grains in the outer parts of a planet-forming disc around a young star. By applying a novel technique to observations of an object nicknamed the Flying Saucer they find that the grains are much […]
The Pencil Nebula is pictured in a new image from ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile. This peculiar cloud of glowing gas is part of a huge ring of wreckage left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11 000 years ago. This detailed view was produced by the Wide Field Imager on […]
The Universe is a diverse place, and many stars are quite unlike the Sun. An international team has used the VLT to study what are known as O-type stars, which have very high temperature, mass and brightness. These stars have short and violent lives and play a key role in the evolution of galaxies.