SPECULOOS Project Makes Its First Observations
The SPECULOOS Southern Observatory (SSO) has been successfully installed at the Paranal Observatory and has obtained its first engineering and calibration images — a process…
European Southern Observatory
ESO Captures Stunning Image of a Newly Discovered Triple Star System
The VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope has captured this stunning image of a newly discovered massive triple star system. Nicknamed Apep after an…
Astronomers Discover Super-Earth Orbiting Barnard’s Star
The nearest single star to the Sun hosts an exoplanet at least 3.2 times as massive as Earth — a so-called super-Earth. One of the…
Stunning Exoplanet Beta Pictoris B Time-Lapse Images
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….
GRAVITY Instrument Captures Observations of Material Orbiting Close to a Black Hole
ESO’s exquisitely sensitive GRAVITY instrument has added further evidence to the long-standing assumption that a supermassive black hole lurks in the centre of the Milky…
MUSE Spectrograph Reveals a Universe Aglow
Deep observations made with the MUSE spectrograph on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have uncovered vast cosmic reservoirs of atomic hydrogen surrounding distant galaxies. The exquisite…
FORS2 Captures the Stunning Details of Spiral Galaxy NGC 3981
FORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, has observed the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 in all its glory. The image was captured as…
ESO’s VISTA Telescope Reveals the Interstellar Matter of the Carina Nebula
The Carina Nebula, one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the night sky, has been beautifully imaged by ESO’s VISTA telescope at the Paranal…
Elliptical Elegance – ESO Views Elliptical Galaxy NGC 5018
A glittering host of galaxies populate this rich image taken with ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope, a state-of-the-art 2.6-m telescope designed for surveying the sky in…
ESO’s VLT Captures Remarkably Sharp Test Images of Neptune
ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has achieved first light with a new adaptive optics mode called laser tomography — and has captured remarkably sharp test…
ESO’s Very Large Telescope Shows Star Cluster RCW 38 In All Its Glory
New observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope show the star cluster RCW 38 in all its glory. This image was taken during testing of the…
Striking Images of Blood-Red Moonset at Five-Second Intervals
ESO Photo Ambassador Petr Horálek captured this photoset while visiting ESO’s high-altitude Paranal Observatory in Chile, where skies are remarkably clear. He snapped photographs of…
ESO Image of the Week – New SPHERE View of Vesta
Sitting between Mars and Jupiter, the doughnut-shaped asteroid belt is packed full of rocky bodies and debris. Despite its fragmented, rubbly nature, the total mass…
Gentle Giants of Chajnantor – ALMA Antenna Transporters
Many telescopes are formed of multiple mirrors or antennas, not just one. ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, is…
Starburst Galaxies Contain Much Higher Proportions of Massive Stars
Astronomers using ALMA and the VLT have discovered that both starburst galaxies in the early Universe and a star-forming region in a nearby galaxy contain…
VLT Survey Captures Sharpest Image to Date of the Tarantula Nebula
Glowing brightly about 160,000 light-years away, the Tarantula Nebula is the most spectacular feature of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky…
VIMOS’s Final Image – Interacting Galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427
Two spiral galaxies are locked in a spellbinding, swirling dance in this image from the VIMOS instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). The two…
Astronomers Reveal Evidence of Stars Forming Just 250 Million Years After Big Bang
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…