ESO ALMA Image: Centaurus A in Infra-Red

This new image of Centaurus A combines ALMA and near-infrared observations of the massive elliptical radio galaxy. The green parts show gas coming towards us while more orange features depict gas moving away.

Picture: ESO / BEL/AFP/GettyImages

ESO ALMA Turns Its Eyes to Centaurus A

A new image of the center of the distinctive galaxy Centaurus A, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), shows how the new telescope, which is still under construction, allows astronomers to see with unprecedented quality through the opaque dust lanes that obscure the galaxy's center.

Centaurus A is a massive elliptical "radio galaxy," (a galaxy that emits strong radio waves) and is the most prominent, as well as the nearest, radio galaxy in the sky. Its very luminous center hosts a supermassive black hole with a mass of about 100 million times that of the Sun.

As seen in visible light, a dark dusty band obscures the galaxy's center. This dust lane harbors large amounts of gas, dust and young stars. These features, together with the strong radio emission, indicate that Centaurus A is the result of a collision between a giant elliptical galaxy and a smaller spiral galaxy.

To see through the obscuring dust in the central band, astronomers need to observe using longer wavelengths of light, such as infrared light or radio waves.

The new ALMA observations, shown in a gradation of blue in this image, reveal the position and motion of clouds of gas in the galaxy.


They are the sharpest and most sensitive such observations ever made. ALMA was tuned to detect signals with a wavelength around 1.3 millimeters, emitted by molecules of carbon monoxide gas.

The motion of the gas in the galaxy causes slight changes to this wavelength, shown in this image as changes in color. Violet and dark-blue features trace gas coming towards us, while light-blue features depict gas moving away.

We can see that the gas to the left of the center is moving towards us, while the gas to the right of the center is moving away from us, indicating that the gas is orbiting around the galaxy.

The millimeter wavelength observations were made using super-sensitive radio receivers built by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. In this image the ALMA observations are overlaid on an optical image of Centaurus A produced by the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Construction of ALMA, on the Chajnantor Plateau in northern Chile, will be completed in 2013, when 66 high-precision antennas will be fully operational. Half of the antennas already are installed. Early scientific observations with a partial array began in 2011, and already are producing outstanding results. The ALMA observations of Centaurus A shown here were taken during the telescope's Commissioning and Science Verification phase.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage). Visible-light image: ESO

Spectacular Christmas Comet Amazes ESO Skywatchers

This photo comes from a time-lapse sequence taken by Gabriel Brammer from ESO just two days ago on 22 December 2011. 

Gabriel was finishing his night shift as support astronomer at the Paranal Observatory when the comet rose over the horizon just before dawn.

CREDIT: G. Brammer/ESO

A stunning comet that survived a recent brush with the sun is amazing astronomers again, this time in dazzling new photos captured just before sunrise over Chile.

The comet Lovejoy may not be the famed Star of Bethlehem, but it still provided a jaw-dropping sight for astronomer Gabriel Brammer, photographed the comet rising ahead of the sun on Dec. 22 at Paranal Observatory in Chile's high Atacama Desert.

Brammer is a support astronomer for the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which runs the Paranal facility. His time-lapse photos of comet Lovejoy show it rising ahead of the sun as the Paranal astronomers fire a laser beam, which serves as a guide star, into the sky. Our Milky Way galaxy and the moon are also visible in the images.

"On the last morning of my shift I tried to try catching it on camera before sunrise," Brammer said in a statement.

"The tail of the comet was easily visible with the naked eye, and the combination of the crescent moon, comet, Milky Way and the laser guide star was nearly as impressive to the naked eye as it appears in the long-exposure photos."

ALMA Image Gallery: Atacama Large Millimetre Array

The Atacama Large Millimeter Array, or ALMA, is an international collaboration to develop a world-class telescope composed of a group of 64 radio-telescope antennas that will work together to study the universe from a site in the foothills of Chile's Andes Mountains.

Each of ALMA's 64 antenna dishes will measure 39 feet (12 m) wide. The ALMA antennas will be movable. At its largest, the array will measure 10 miles wide (14 km), and at its smallest, only 500 feet (150 m).

The ALMA correlator, or specialized computer that combines the information received by the antennas, will perform an astounding 16,000 million-million (1.6x10¹⁶) operations per second.

ALMA's location in the Atacama Desert is one of the highest, driest places on Earth, making it ideal for astronomical research at millimeter wavelengths, which are absorbed by atmospheric moisture.

When completed (in 2011), ALMA will be the largest and most capable imaging array of telescopes in the world. For more information, please visit the ALMA homepage.

Click any thumbnail below to view the details of that image.

ALMA Telescope: First Stunning Glimpse of the Universe

The Antennae Galaxies, 70 million light-years away ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

Astonomers gave the world its first-time peek into the cosmos when they released images Monday from the world's most powerful ground-based telescope in Chile.

The international team behind the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, the world's largest and most complex telescope, gave the first official snapshot of galaxies that visible or infrared-viewing telescopes could not capture.

Radically distinct from the optical telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope, ALMA will consist of an array of linked 66 radio antennas acting as a single giant telescope, able to detect much longer wavelengths than those of visible light. 

The telescope isn't completely functional yet, with only 12 of the anticipated 66 radio antennas functioning, but that didn't stop astronomers from giving a sneak peek.

"Today marks the recognition of the successful coalition of thousands of people from all over the world all working with the same goal: to build the world's most advanced radio telescope to see into the Universe's coldest, darkest places, where galaxies and stars and perhaps the building blocks of life are created," said Thijs de Graauw, the director of the $1.3 billion radio telescope.

At millimeter and sub-millimeter wavelengths, astronomers would be able to make out the swirling gas that formed the first stars in the very early universe, over 13 billion years ago.

ALMA has been under construction since 2003. The images from the climate-armored antennas linked via fiber optic cabling are assembled into one large view by one of the world's fastest, special-purpose supercomputers, the ALMA Correlator.

The sharpness, quality, efficiency of its observation are expected to improve dramatically as the observatory grows progressively, at an elevation of 16,500 feet on the Chilean Andres, one of the driest places in the world that has year-round clear skies.

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/W. Garnier (ALMA)

ALMA officials expect all 66 radio antennas to be built by 2013.

"Alma has got such a fantastic increase in sensitivity compared to previous sub-millimetre wave telescopes, we're expecting that, every three minutes that Alma is observing the sky, it will discover one brand new galaxy somewhere in the universe," said John Richer of the University of Cambridge, a project scientist for ALMA.

ESO VLT looks into the eyes of the Virgin

Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope, at the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Cerro Paranal facility in Chile, announce that they were recently able to capture a remarkable new image of a galactic duo called The Eyes.

Another reason why this image is very important is that it's the first-ever to be created through the ESO Cosmic Gems program, a public outreach initiative, meant to get more people involved with the field of astronomy.

As the name suggests, the program will mostly focus on either known or extremely interesting cosmic features that have something special over other objects or structures in their respective classes. ESO hopes that this will make more students interested in what's going on in space.

To that end, imaging this beautiful, yet peculiar pair of galaxies appeared to be the logical thing to do. NGC 4438, the larger galaxy in the system, did not always look like this. In fact, hundreds of millions of years ago, it was a majestic spiral galaxies.

Repeated collisions with surrounding dwarf galaxies eventually ripped its beautiful structure apart, leaving only this stained formation behind. However, the past events made the galaxy look like the pair of NGC 4435, its companion.

When viewed through a moderate-sized telescope, both galaxies appear as a bright set of eyes in the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin). The galaxies themselves are an estimated 100,000 light-years apart from each other, a distance smaller than the diameter of the Milky Way.

The interacting structures are located an estimated 50 million light-years away from Earth, which is relatively close in cosmic terms. This is also the reason why they can be effortlessly observed with a moderate-sized telescope on a dark night.

Interestingly, the cores of NGC 4438 and NGC 4435 look similar, but their edges couldn't be more different. While the former still contains vast amounts of cosmic dust and hydrogen gas, the smaller one is literally devoid of such materials, which implies it no longer forms blue stars.

“Some astronomers believe that the damage caused to NGC 4438 resulted from an approach between the two galaxies to within about 16 000 light-years that happened some 100 million years ago,” an ESO press release accompanying the findings expalins.

“But while the larger galaxy was damaged, the smaller one was significantly more affected by the collision. Gravitational tides from this clash are probably responsible for ripping away the contents of NGC 4438, and for reducing NGC 4435’s mass and removing most of its gas and dust,” they add.

“Another possibility is that the giant elliptical galaxy Messier 86, further away from The Eyes and not visible in this image, was responsible for the damage caused to NGC 4438,” the team concludes.

ESO VLT: Deep in the Chilean Atacama Desert

Snow rarely falls in the Chilean Atacama Desert, where ESO's Very Large Telescope sits atop Cerro Paranal, a 8500-foot-high (2600-meter-high) mountain. 

The Atacama Desert is a very dry place with humidity often dropping below 10 percent and rainfall of less than 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) per year. 

This picture, taken shortly before sunrise, shows the landscape of the Atacama and the mountaintop domes of the VLT, and also the night sky. 

To the left of the VLT is a satellite trail, and to the right a meteor streaks through the sky. [View all images]

Fine Ring Nebula: Smoke Signals in Space

The hazy and aptly named Fine Ring Nebula, shown here, is an unusual planetary nebula.

Planetary nebulae form when some dying stars, having expanded into a red giant phase, expel a shell of gas as they evolve into white dwarfs.

Most planetary nebulae are either spherical or elliptical in shape, or bipolar (featuring two symmetric lobes of material).

The Fine Ring Nebula — captured here by the ESO Faint Object Spectrograph and Camera mounted on the New Technology Telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile — looks like an almost perfect circular ring.

Astronomers believe that some of these more unusually shaped planetary nebulae are formed when the progenitor star is actually a binary system. The interaction between the primary star and its orbiting companion shapes the ejected material.

Credit: ESO

ESO Image: Rare green flash on the moon

A rare green flash on the moon is captured by ESO Electronics Engineer Gerhard Hudeepohl using European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile.

The effect is caused by the Earth's atmosphere bending or refracting light. The effect is greater in the lower, denser layers of the atmosphere.

ESO explains: "Shorter wavelengths of light are bent more than longer wavelengths, so that the green light from the Sun or moon appears to be coming from a slightly higher position than the orange and red light, from the point of view of an observer.

When the conditions are just right, with an additional mirage effect due to the temperature gradient in the atmosphere, the elusive green flash is briefly visible at the upper edge of the solar or lunar disc when it is close to the horizon."

ESO VLT Image: Drama of star formation

This very detailed false-colour image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows the dramatic effects of very young stars on the dust and gas from which they were born in the star-forming region NGC 6729.

The baby stars are invisible in this picture, being hidden behind dust clouds at the upper left of the picture, but material they are ejecting is crashing into the surroundings at speeds of that can be as high as one million kilometres per hour.

This picture was taken by the FORS1 instrument and records the scene in the light of glowing hydrogen and sulphur.

EU ESO Image: Frantic activity revealed in dusty stellar factories

Thanks to the Very Large Telescope's acute and powerful near-infrared eye, astronomers have uncovered a host of new young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries in nearby galaxy NGC 253. 

The centre of this galaxy appears to harbour a twin of our own Milky Way's supermassive black hole.

Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain) used NACO, a sharp-eyed adaptive optics instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), to study the fine detail in NGC 253, one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky.

Adaptive Optics (AO) corrects for the blurring effect introduced by the Earth's atmosphere. This turbulence causes the stars to twinkle in a way that delights poets, but frustrates astronomers, since it smears out the images. With AO in action the telescope can produce images that are as sharp as is theoretically possible, as if the telescope were in space.

NACO revealed features in the galaxy that were only 11 light-years across. "Our observations provide us with so much spatially resolved detail that we can, for the first time, compare them with the finest radio maps for this galaxy — maps that have existed for more than a decade," says Juan Antonio
Fernández-Ontiveros, the lead author of the paper reporting the results.

Astronomers identified 37 distinct bright regions, a threefold increase on previous results, packed into a tiny region at the core of the galaxy, comprising just one percent of the galaxy's total size.

The astronomers combined their NACO images with data from another VLT instrument, VISIR, as well as with images from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and radio observations made by the Very Large Array and the Very Large Baseline Interferometer. Combining these observations, taken in different wavelength regimes, provided a clue to the nature of these regions.

"We now think that these are probably very active nurseries that contain many stars bursting from their dusty cocoons," says Jose Antonio Acosta-Pulido, a member of the team. NGC 253 is known as a starburst galaxy, after its very intense star formation activity. Each bright region could contain as many as one hundred thousand young, massive stars.

This comprehensive set of data also leads astronomers to conclude that the centre of NGC 253 hosts a scaled-up version of Sagittarius A*, the bright radio source that lies at the core of the Milky Way and which we know harbours a massive black hole (see ESO Press Release eso0846).

"We have thus discovered what could be a twin of our Galaxy's Centre," says co-author Almudena Prieto.

ESO Image Mirror Nebula: Reflected Glory

The nebula Messier 78 takes centre stage in this image taken with the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, while the stars powering the bright display take a backseat. 

The brilliant starlight ricochets off dust particles in the nebula, illuminating it with scattered blue light. Igor Chekalin was the overall winner of ESO’s Hidden Treasures 2010 astrophotography competition with his image of this stunning object.

Messier 78 is a fine example of a reflection nebula. The ultraviolet radiation from the stars that illuminate it is not intense enough to ionise the gas to make it glow — its dust particles simply reflect the starlight that falls on them. Despite this, Messier 78 can easily be observed with a small telescope, being one of the brightest reflection nebulae in the sky. It lies about 1350 light-years away in the constellation of Orion (The Hunter) and can be found northeast of the easternmost star of Orion’s belt.

This new image of Messier 78 from the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory is based on data selected by Igor Chekalin in his winning entry to the Hidden Treasures competition [1].

The pale blue tint seen in the nebula in this picture is an accurate representation of its dominant colour. Blue hues are commonly seen in reflection nebulae because of the way the starlight is scattered by the tiny dust particles that they contain: the shorter wavelength of blue light is scattered more efficiently than the longer wavelength red light.

This image contains many other striking features apart from the glowing nebula. A thick band of obscuring dust stretches across the image from the upper left to the lower right, blocking the light from background stars.

In the bottom right corner, many curious pink structures are also visible, which are created by jets of material being ejected from stars that have recently formed and are still buried deep in dust clouds.


ESO - eso1105 - Reflected Glory

ESO Image: Orion Nebula

This picture provided by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) shows an image of the Orion Nebula captured using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.

The nebula offers astronomers a close-up view of a massive star-forming region to help advance our understanding of stellar birth and evolution

NASA ISS Image: HPS9 Glacier in Chilean Patagonia

Photo Courtesy of NASA Astronaut Clayton Anderson

ESO VLT Images: Six Spiral Galaxies

Six spiral galaxies are seen in a clear new light in pictures from ESO’s Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The pictures were taken in infrared light, using the powerful new HAWK-I camera, to help astronomers understand how the spiral patterns in galaxies form and evolve. Credit: ESO/P. Grosbøl

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VISTA Captures Celestial Cat’s Hidden Secrets

Cat's Paw Nebula Click for More Pictures

ESO image taken with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the glowing gas and dust clouds obscuring the view are penetrated by infrared light and some of the Cat’s hidden young stars are revealed.

Towards the heart of the Milky Way, 5500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpius (the Scorpion), the Cat’s Paw Nebula stretches across 50 light-years. In visible light, gas and dust are illuminated by hot young stars, creating strange reddish shapes that give the object its nickname.

A recent image by ESO’s Wide Field Imager (WFI) at the La Silla Observatory (eso1003) captured this visible light view in great detail. NGC 6334 is one of the most active nurseries of massive stars in our galaxy.

VISTA, the latest addition to ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert, is the world’s largest survey telescope (eso0949). It works at infrared wavelengths, seeing right through much of the dust that is such a beautiful but distracting aspect of the nebula, and revealing objects hidden from the sight of visible light telescopes. Visible light tends to be scattered and absorbed by interstellar dust, but the dust is nearly transparent to infrared light.