ESO

Despite being only a couple of months into the year, the various telescopes of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have already provided some truly breathtaking sights. From dusty stellar nurseries to giant star clusters, here's a look at the best ESO images of 2013 so far.  Read More

The European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has been used to observe what is thought to be the formation of a gas giant similar to Jupiter. The candidate planet resides within a disk of dust and gas surrounding the young star HD 100546, located 335 light-years away.  Read More

The study of data collected by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has revealed that cosmic rays, some of the fastest traveling particles in the universe, are produced by supernovae. A separate study by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has made similar findings, largely corroborating the Fermi results.  Read More

In April 2011, Makemake – one of five dwarf planets in our Solar System – passed between Earth and a distant star. Using seven telescopes, an international team of astronomers observed the event, known as stellar occultation, and through careful analysis, have determined the planet's size, density, and even the nature of its atmosphere.  Read More

While the Kepler spacecraft’s mission to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars continues to produce results, astronomers have found what is likely to be a planet that is not gravitationally bound to any star. The rogue planet, called CFBDSIR2149, is around 100 light years from our solar system, making it the closest free-floating planetary mass yet discovered. Its relative proximity, coupled with the lack of a bright star in its vicinity, has allowed researchers to study its atmosphere in great detail, which should help provide a better understanding of exoplanets that do orbit stars.  Read More

The European Space Observatory (ESO) has released an impressive 9-gigapixel image of the central part of the Milky Way Galaxy. The historic image contains some 84 million stars and represents the largest ever catalog of the center of our home galaxy.  Read More

Using the latest-generation Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), which is an advanced system of 64 radio-telescope antennas in northern Chile, scientists at the European Southern Observatory have discovered a simple form of sugar orbiting a small binary star. Known as 16293-2422, that star is only 400 light-years away, and has about the same mass as the Sun. The finding could shed light on how the building blocks of life can originate spontaneously in deep space, even without a planet to support them.  Read More

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) council met on Monday in Garching, Germany and approved the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) program, pending the confirmation of ad referendum votes from the authorities of four member states before the next council meeting. Assuming all goes according to plan, the E-ELT is expected to begin operation early in the next decade.  Read More

Astronomers have been discovering planets outside of our solar system – or exoplanets – at a steady rate in recent years. The number has now topped 500 and with earth-bound detection improving all the time and the Kepler mission out hunting with the largest camera ever sent into space, the rate is not likely to slow down anytime soon. Among these discoveries are some extraordinary finds like the first "potentially habitable" exoplanet, but what's different about this latest discovery is not the Earth-like qualities of the planet, it's the fact that it originated from outside the Milky Way – which makes it an extragalactic exoplanet.  Read More