The VLT's laser beam creates a "false star" for adaptive optics calibration. (ESO/Y. Beletsky)
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Located high in the mountains of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the enormous telescopes of the European Southern Observatory have been providing astronomers with unprecedented views of the night sky for 50 years. ESO’s suite of telescopes take advantage of the cold, clear air over the Atacama, which is one of the driest places on Earth. But as clear as it is, there is still some turbulence and variations to contend with — especially when peering billions of light-years out into the Universe.
So how do they do it?
Thanks to adaptive optics and advanced laser calibration, ESO can negate the effects of atmospheric turbulence, bringing the distant Universe into focus. It’s an impressive orchestration of innovation and engineering and the ESO team has put together a video to show us how it’s done.
We all love the images (and the science) so here’s a look behind the scenes!
An ESO telescope captures a group of hot young stars that would outshine any Hollywood party!
At the upper left of this image is the star cluster NGC 6604, a grouping of hot young stars within a larger collection located in the sky near the much more famous Eagle Nebula (of “Pillars of Creation” fame.) The young stars, which burn bright and blue, are helping make a new generation of stars with their strong stellar winds, which condense nearby gas and dust into even more star-forming regions.
Eventually the new stars will replace the ones seen here, which, although big and bright, will quickly burn through their stellar fuel and fade. Such is the life cycle of massive stars — live fast and die young.
This image was acquired by the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile. NGC 6604 is about 5,500 light-years from Earth, located in the constellation Serpens. Read more on the ESO news release here.
Artist's impression of dark matter surrounding the Milky Way. (ESO/L. Calçada)
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A survey of the galactic region around our solar system by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has turned up a surprising lack of dark matter, making its alleged existence even more of a mystery.
The 2.2m MPG-ESO telescope, used in the survey. (ESO/H.H.Heyer)
Dark matter is an invisible substance that is suspected to exist in large quantity around galaxies, lending mass but emitting no radiation. The only evidence for it comes from its gravitational effect on the material around it… up to now, dark matter itself has not been directly detected. Regardless, it has been estimated to make up 80% of all the mass in the Universe.
A team of astronomers at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile has mapped the region around over 400 stars near the Sun, some of which were over 13,000 light-years distant. What they found was a quantity of material that coincided with what was observable: stars, gas, and dust… but no dark matter.
“The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun,” said team leader Christian Moni Bidin of the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. “But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”
Based on the team’s results, the dark matter halos thought to envelop galaxies would have to have “unusual” shapes — making their actual existence highly improbable.
Still, something is causing matter and radiation in the Universe to behave in a way that belies its visible mass. If it’s not dark matter, then what is it?
“Despite the new results, the Milky Way certainly rotates much faster than the visible matter alone can account for,” Bidin said. “So, if dark matter is not present where we expected it, a new solution for the missing mass problem must be found.
“Our results contradict the currently accepted models. The mystery of dark matter has just became even more mysterious.”
Artist’s impression of sunset on the super-Earth world Gliese 667 Cc. Credit: ESO
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Could there be ‘tens of billions’ of habitable worlds in our own galaxy? That’s the results from a new study that searched for rocky planets in the habitable zones around red dwarf stars. An international team of astronomers using ESO’s HARPS spectrograph now estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy, with probably about one hundred in the Sun’s immediate neighborhood, less than 30 light years away.
“Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet,” said Xavier Bonfils, from IPAG, Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble, France, and the leader of the team. “Because red dwarfs are so common — there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way — this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.”
This team used the HARPS spectrograph on the 3.6-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile to search for exoplanets orbiting the most common kind of star in the Milky Way — red dwarf stars (also known as M dwarfs). These stars are faint and cool compared to the Sun, but very common and long-lived, and therefore account for 80% of all the stars in the Milky Way.
The Milky Way over the ESO 3.6-metre Telescope, a photo submitted via Your ESO Pictures Flickr Group. Credit: ESO/A. Santerne
The HARPS team surveyed a carefully chosen sample of 102 red dwarf stars in the southern skies over a six-year period. A total of nine super-Earths (planets with masses between one and ten times that of Earth) were found, including two inside the habitable zones of Gliese 581 and Gliese 667 C respectively.
By combining all the data, including observations of stars that did not have planets, and looking at the fraction of existing planets that could be discovered, the team has been able to work out how common different sorts of planets are around red dwarfs. They find that the frequency of occurrence of super-Earths in the habitable zone is 41% with a range from 28% to 95%.
Bonfils and his team also found that rocky planets were far more common than massive gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Less than 12% of red dwarfs are expected to have giant planets (with masses between 100 and 1000 times that of the Earth).
However, the rocky worlds orbiting red dwarfs wouldn’t necessarily be a good place to spend your first exo-vacation – or for harboring life.
“The habitable zone around a red dwarf, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on the surface, is much closer to the star than the Earth is to the Sun,” said Stéphane Udry from the Geneva Observatory and member of the team. “But red dwarfs are known to be subject to stellar eruptions or flares, which may bathe the planet in X-rays or ultraviolet radiation, and which may make life there less likely.”
New Exoplanet Discovered
A new exoplanet was discovered in this HARPS survey of red dwarfs: Gliese 667 Cc. This is the second planet in this triple star system and seems to be situated close to the center of the habitable zone. Although this planet is more than four times heavier than the Earth it is the closest twin to Earth found so far and almost certainly has the right conditions for the existence of liquid water on its surface. This is the second super-Earth planet inside the habitable zone of a red dwarf discovered during this HARPS survey, after Gliese 581d was announced in 2007 and confirmed in 2009.
“Now that we know that there are many super-Earths around nearby red dwarfs we need to identify more of them using both HARPS and future instruments,” said Xavier Delfosse, another member of the team. “Some of these planets are expected to pass in front of their parent star as they orbit — this will open up the exciting possibility of studying the planet’s atmosphere and searching for signs of life.”
Mosaic of infrared survey images from ESO's VISTA reveal over 200,000 distant galaxies. (ESO/UltraVISTA team. Acknowledgement: TERAPIX/CNRS/INSU/CASU.)
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See all those tiny points of light in this image? Most of them aren’t stars; they’re entire galaxies, seen by the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA survey telescope located at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
This is a combination of over 6000 images taken with a total exposure time of 55 hours, and is the widest deep view of the sky ever taken in infrared light.
The galaxies in this VISTA image are only visible in infrared light because they are very far away. The ever-increasing expansion rate of the Universe shifts the light coming from the most distant objects (like early galaxies) out of visible wavelengths and into the infrared spectrum.
ESO’s VISTA (Visual and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) telescope is the world’s largest and most powerful infrared observatory, and has the ability to peer deep into the Universe to reveal these incredibly distant, incredibly ancient structures.
By studying such faraway objects astronomers can better understand how the structures of galaxies and galactic clusters evolved throughout time.
The region seen in this deep view is an otherwise “unremarkable” and apparently empty section of sky located in the constellation Sextans.
Erasure's Andy Bell in front of ESO's Very Large Telescope array. Credit: S. Lowery/Erasure/ESO.
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British synthpop band Erasure released a video today featuring lead singer Andy Bell in front of the telescopes of ESO’s Paranal Observatory, located high in the mountains of Chile’s Atacama Desert. The new single “Fill Us With Fire” honors ESO’s 50th anniversary this year. Watch the full video below!
The video features the Very Large Telescope as well as some of ESO’s stunning images of the night sky. This is the third single to be released from their 2011 album Tomorrow’s World.
Andy spent one day at Paranal in February 2012, during which time footage was shot of him singing Erasure’s latest single. The footage was edited with some of ESO’s best astronomical images. Andy, thrilled with the result, decided to dedicate it to ESO’s 50th Anniversary and make it the exclusive video for the single.
Shooting the Fill Us With Fire video. (F. Huber/Erasure/ESO)
Standing on a 20-foot-high platform in front of the VLT, Andy didn’t have a lot of room to move around during the shooting of the video. Say what you will about the choreography, I think it’s awesome to see the observatory and some of its amazing images featured in a new music video!
Personally, I would have wanted to be standing on top of one of the telescope domes but I’m not sure if that’s allowed.
Credit: Erasure/ESO (S. Lowery)
Directed by: Simon Lowery
Editing: Simon Lowery, Lars Lindberg Christensen & Patrick Geeraert
Music: Erasure/Andy Bell
Footage and photos: ESO, Guillaume Blanchard & Simon Lowery
An Earthshine-lit moon sets over ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile.
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It may seem like a silly question — of course there’s life on Earth — but what if we didn’t know that? What if we were looking at Earth from another vantage point, from another planet in another star system, perhaps? Would we be able to discern then if Earth were in fact teeming with life? All we’d have to go on would be the tiniest bit of light reflected off Earth, nearly lost in the intense glare of the Sun.
Researchers have found that the secret is knowing what kind of light to look for. And they discovered this with a little help from the Moon.
How Earthshine works. (ESO/L. Calçada)
By using Earthshine — sunlight light reflected off Earth onto the Moon — astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have been able to discern variations that correlate with identifying factors of our planet as being a happy home for life.
In observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), the presence of oceans, clouds, atmospheric gases and even plants could be detected in the reflected Earthshine.
The breakthrough method was the use of spectropolarimetry, which measures polarized light reflected from Earth. Like polarized sunglasses are able to filter out reflected glare to allow you to see clearer, spectropolarimetry can focus on light reflected off a planet, allowing scientists to more clearly identify important biological signatures.
“The light from a distant exoplanet is overwhelmed by the glare of the host star, so it’s very difficult to analyze — a bit like trying to study a grain of dust beside a powerful light bulb,” said Stefano Bagnulo of the Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland, and co-author of the study. “But the light reflected by a planet is polarized, while the light from the host star is not. So polarimetric techniques help us to pick out the faint reflected light of an exoplanet from the dazzling starlight.”
Since we have fairly reliable proof that life does in fact exist on Earth, this provides astronomers with a process and a benchmark for locating evidence of life on other distant worlds — life as we know it, anyway.
Main image credit: ESO/B. Tafreshi/TWAN (twanight.org). This research was presented in a paper, “Biosignatures as revealed by spectropolarimetry of Earthshine”, by M. Sterzik et al. to appear in the journal Nature on 1st March 2012. The team is composed of Michael F. Sterzik (ESO, Chile), Stefano Bagnulo (Armagh Observatory, Northern Ireland, UK) and Enric Palle (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain).
This view shows the thin crescent Moon setting over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Credit: ESO/B. Tafreshi/TWAN
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Earthshine – a poetic, fanciful word for the soft, faint glow on the Moon when the light from the Sun is reflected from the Earth’s surface, onto the dark part of the Moon. And as unlikely as it might seem, astronomers have used Earthshine to verify there’s life in the Universe: Us. While we already know about life on our own world, this technique validates that faint light from distant worlds could also be used to find potential alien life.
“We used a trick called earthshine observation to look at the Earth as if it were an exoplanet,” said Michael Sterzik from the European Southern Observatory. “The Sun shines on the Earth and this light is reflected back to the surface of the Moon. The lunar surface acts as a giant mirror and reflects the Earth’s light back to us — and this is what we have observed with the VLT (Very Large Telescope).”
Sterzik and his team said the fingerprints of life, or biosignatures, are hard to find with conventional methods, but they have now pioneered a new approach that is more sensitive. The astronomers used Earth as a benchmark for the future search for life on planets beyond our Solar System. They can analyze the faint planetshine light to look for indicators, such as certain combinations of gases in the atmosphere – as they found looking at earthshine – to find telltale signs of organic life.
Looking at earthshine, they found strong bio-signatures such as molecular oxygen and methane, as well as the presence of a ‘red edge’ caused by surface vegetation.
By observing earthshine astronomers can study the properties of light reflected from Earth as if it were an exoplanet and search for signs of life. The reflected light is also strongly polarised and studying the polarisation as well as the intensity at different colours allows for much more sensitive tests for the presence of life. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada
Instead of just looking at the planet’s reflected light, astronomers can also use spectropolarimetry, which looks at the polarization of the light. Using this approach, the biosignatures in the reflected light from Earth show up very strongly.
“The light from a distant exoplanet is overwhelmed by the glare of the host star, so it’s very difficult to analyze — a bit like trying to study a grain of dust beside a powerful light bulb,” said co-author Stefano Bagnulo from Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland. “But the light reflected by a planet is polarised, while the light from the host star is not. So polarimetric techniques help us to pick out the faint reflected light of an exoplanet from the dazzling starlight.”
By looking at earthshine, the team was able to deduce that the Earth’s atmosphere is partly cloudy, that part of its surface is covered by oceans and — crucially — that there is vegetation present. They could even detect changes in the cloud cover and amount of vegetation at different times as different parts of the Earth reflected light towards the Moon.
“These observations allow us to determine the fractional contribution of clouds and ocean surface, and are sensitive to Spectropolarimetry unveils strong biosignatures, visible areas of vegetation as small as 10%,” the team wrote in their paper.
“Finding life outside the Solar System depends on two things: whether this life exists in the first place, and having the technical capability to detect it,” said co-author Enric Palle from Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, Tenerife, Spain. “This work is an important step towards reaching that capability.”
“Spectropolarimetry may ultimately tell us if simple plant life — based on photosynthetic processes — has emerged elsewhere in the Universe,” said Sterzik. “But we are certainly not looking for little green men or evidence of intelligent life.”
The astronomers said that future telescopes such as the E-ELT (the European Extremely Large Telescope), could provide more detail about the type of life beyond planets that may exists on another world.
This image from the APEX telescope, of part of the Taurus Molecular Cloud, shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long. Could life exist in molecular clouds like this one? Credit: ESO/APEX (MPIfR/ESO/OSO)/A. Hacar et al./Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.
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This stunning new image shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long. The makeup of filamentary cloud structures like this used to be a mystery, and in the early 20th century, Edward Emerson Barnard compiled a photographic atlas of these features, calling them “dark markings of the sky,” as these regions appeared as dark lanes, with no stars visible. Barnard correctly argued that this appearance was due to “obscuring matter in space.” Today we call segments in this particular cloud Barnard 211 and Barnard 213, or the Taurus Molecular Cloud. And we now know that these are clouds of interstellar gas and dust grains. But also, within these clouds, newborn stars are hidden, and dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars.
The Taurus Molecular Cloud is one of the closest regions of star formation to us. It is located in the constellation of Taurus about 450 light-years from Earth. The cosmic dust grains are so cold that observations at wavelengths of around one millimeter, such as these made with the LABOCA camera on APEX (Atacama Pathfinder Experiment) telescope in Chile, are needed to detect their faint glow.
This image shows two parts of a long filament. The dust grains — tiny particles similar to very fine soot and sand — absorb visible light, blocking our view of the rich star field behind the clouds. The Taurus Molecular Cloud is particularly dark at visible wavelengths, as it lacks the massive stars that illuminate the nebulae in other star-formation regions such as Orion.
But active star formation is taking place. This is why observations at longer wavelengths, such as the millimeter range, are essential for understanding the early stages of star formation.
Read more about this particular region at the ESO website.
A broad panorama of the Carina Nebula, a region of massive star formation in the southern skies. This new method of determining the age of stars will help astronomers better understand the process of star formation. Credit: ESO/T. Preibisch
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Like finding buried treasure, this new image of the Carina Nebula has uncovered details not seen before. This vibrant image, from ESO’s Very Large Telescope shows not just the brilliant massive stars, but uncovers hundreds of thousands of much fainter stars that were previously hidden from view. Hundreds of individual images have been combined to create this picture, which is the most detailed infrared mosaic of the nebula ever taken and one of the most dramatic images ever created by the VLT.
A color composite in visible light of the Carina Nebula. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.
Although this nebula is spectacular when seen through telescopes, or in normal visible-light pictures, many of its secrets are hidden behind thick clouds of dust. Using HAWK-I infrared camera along with the VLT, many previously hidden features have emerged from the murk. One of the main goals of the astronomers, led by Thomas Preibisch from the University Observatory, Munich, Germany, was to search for stars in this region that were much fainter and less massive than the Sun. The image is also deep enough to allow the detection of young brown dwarfs.
The dazzling but unstable star Eta Carinae appears at the lower left of the new picture. This star is likely to explode as a supernova in the near future, by astronomical standards. It is surrounded by clouds of gas that are glowing under the onslaught of fierce ultraviolet radiation. Across the image there are also many compact blobs of dark material that remain opaque even in the infrared. These are the dusty cocoons in which new stars are forming.
The Carina Nebula lies about 7,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Carina.
This video zooms in on the new infrared view of the Carina Nebula:
