Stars born in winds from supermassive black holes

Observations using ESO's Very Large Telescope have revealed stars forming within powerful outflows of material blasted out from supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies. These are the first confirmed observations ...

Dark matter less influential in galaxies in early universe

New observations indicate that massive, star-forming galaxies during the peak epoch of galaxy formation, 10 billion years ago, were dominated by baryonic or 'normal' matter. This is in stark contrast to present-day galaxies, ...

A galaxy on the edge

Spiral galaxies throughout the Universe take on all manner of orientations with respect to Earth. We see some from above (as it were) or "face-on"—a good example of this being the whirlpool-shaped galaxy NGC 1232. Such ...

Celestial cat meets cosmic lobster

Astronomers have for a long time studied the glowing, cosmic clouds of gas and dust catalogued as NGC 6334 and NGC 6357, this gigantic new image from ESO's Very Large Telescope Survey Telescope being only the most recent ...

Contracts signed for ELT mirrors and sensors

At a ceremony today at ESO's Headquarters four contracts were signed for major components of the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) that ESO is building. These were for: the casting of the telescope's giant secondary and tertiary ...

VLT to search for planets in Alpha Centauri system

ESO has signed an agreement with the Breakthrough Initiatives to adapt the Very Large Telescope instrumentation in Chile to conduct a search for planets in the nearby star system Alpha Centauri. Such planets could be the ...

Hidden secrets of Orion's clouds

This spectacular new image is one of the largest near-infrared high-resolution mosaics of the Orion A molecular cloud, the nearest known massive star factory, lying about 1350 light-years from Earth. It was taken using the ...

First light for band 5 at ALMA

ALMA observes radio waves from the Universe, at the low-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum. With the newly installed Band 5 receivers, ALMA has now opened its eyes to a whole new section of this radio spectrum, creating ...

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