Revisiting an old beauty

NGC 4414

A large spiral galaxy is seen tilted diagonally. The arms of the galaxy’s disc are speckled with glowing patches; some are blue in colour, others are pink, showing gas illuminated by new stars. A faint glow surrounds the galaxy, which lies on a dark, nearly empty background. The galaxy's centre glows in white.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope unbarred spiral galaxy roughly 51 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Coma Berenices.

You can see an old image of NGC 4414 that features Hubble data from 1995 and 1999 here, which was captured as one of the telescope’s primary missions to determine the distance to galaxies. This was achieved as part of an ongoing research effort to study Cepheid variable stars. Cepheids are a special type of variable star with very stable and predictable brightness variations. The period of these variations depends on physical properties of the stars such as their mass and true brightness. This means that astronomers, just by looking at the variability of their light, can find out about the Cepheids' physical nature, which then can be used very effectively to determine their distance. For this reason cosmologists call Cepheids 'standard candles'.

Astronomers have used Hubble to observe Cepheids, like those that reside in NGC 4414, with extraordinary results. The Cepheids have then been used as stepping-stones to make distance measurements for supernovae, which have, in turn, given a measure for the scale of the Universe. Today we know the age of the Universe to a much higher precision than before Hubble: around 13.7 billion years.

Links

• Image B (closeup of NGC 4414's supernovae)
• Pan of NGC 4414

Source: ESA/Hubble/potw

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Hubble and Gaia Team Up to Fuel Cosmic Conundrum

Using two of the world’s most powerful space telescopes — NASA’s Hubble and ESA’s Gaia — astronomers have made the most precise measurements to date of the universe’s expansion rate. This is calculated by gauging the distances between nearby galaxies using special types of stars called Cepheid variables as cosmic yardsticks. By comparing their intrinsic brightness as measured by Hubble, with their apparent brightness as seen from Earth, scientists can calculate their distances. Gaia further refines this yardstick by geometrically measuring the distances to Cepheid variables within our Milky Way galaxy. This allowed astronomers to more precisely calibrate the distances to Cepheids that are seen in outside galaxies.  Science: NASA, ESA, and A. Riess (STScI/JHU)

Using the power and synergy of two space telescopes, astronomers have made the most precise measurement to date of the universe’s expansion rate.

The results further fuel the mismatch between measurements for the expansion rate of the nearby universe, and those of the distant, primeval universe — before stars and galaxies even existed.

This so-called “tension” implies that there could be new physics underlying the foundations of the universe. Possibilities include the interaction strength of dark matter, dark energy being even more exotic than previously thought, or an unknown new particle in the tapestry of space.

Combining observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia space observatory, astronomers further refined the previous value for the Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe is expanding from the big bang 13.8 billion years ago.

But as the measurements have become more precise, the team’s determination of the Hubble constant has become more and more at odds with the measurements from another space observatory, ESA’s Planck mission, which is coming up with a different predicted value for the Hubble constant.

Planck mapped the primeval universe as it appeared only 360,000 years after the big bang. The entire sky is imprinted with the signature of the big bang encoded in microwaves. Planck measured the sizes of the ripples in this Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) that were produced by slight irregularities in the big bang fireball. The fine details of these ripples encode how much dark matter and normal matter there is, the trajectory of the universe at that time, and other cosmological parameters.

These measurements, still being assessed, allow scientists to predict how the early universe would likely have evolved into the expansion rate we can measure today. However, those predictions don’t seem to match the new measurements of our nearby contemporary universe.

“With the addition of this new Gaia and Hubble Space Telescope data, we now have a serious tension with the Cosmic Microwave Background data,” said Planck team member and lead analyst George Efstathiou of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology in Cambridge, England, who was not involved with the new work.

“The tension seems to have grown into a full-blown incompatibility between our views of the early and late time universe,” said team leader and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “At this point, clearly it’s not simply some gross error in any one measurement. It’s as though you predicted how tall a child would become from a growth chart and then found the adult he or she became greatly exceeded the prediction. We are very perplexed.”

In 2005, Riess and members of the SHOES (Supernova H₀ for the Equation of State) Team set out to measure the universe’s expansion rate with unprecedented accuracy. In the following years, by refining their techniques, this team shaved down the rate measurement’s uncertainty to unprecedented levels. Now, with the power of Hubble and Gaia combined, they have reduced that uncertainty to just 2.2 percent.

Because the Hubble constant is needed to estimate the age of the universe, the long-sought answer is one of the most important numbers in cosmology. It is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, who nearly a century ago discovered that the universe was uniformly expanding in all directions—a finding that gave birth to modern cosmology.

Galaxies appear to recede from Earth proportional to their distances, meaning that the farther away they are, the faster they appear to be moving away. This is a consequence of expanding space, and not a value of true space velocity. By measuring the value of the Hubble constant over time, astronomers can construct a picture of our cosmic evolution, infer the make-up of the universe, and uncover clues concerning its ultimate fate.

The two major methods of measuring this number give incompatible results. One method is direct, building a cosmic “distance ladder” from measurements of stars in our local universe. The other method uses the CMB to measure the trajectory of the universe shortly after the Big Bang and then uses physics to describe the universe and extrapolate to the present expansion rate. Together, the measurements should provide an end-to-end test of our basic understanding of the so-called “Standard Model” of the universe. However, the pieces don’t fit
.

Using Hubble and newly released data from Gaia, Riess’ team measured the present rate of expansion to be 73.5 kilometers (45.6 miles) per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it appears to be moving 73.5 kilometers per second faster. However, the Planck results predict the universe should be expanding today at only 67.0 kilometers (41.6 miles) per second per megaparsec. As the teams’ measurements have become more and more precise, the chasm between them has continued to widen, and is now about 4 times the size of their combined uncertainty.

Over the years, Riess’ team has refined the Hubble constant value by streamlining and strengthening the “cosmic distance ladder,” used to measure precise distances to nearby and far-off galaxies. They compared those distances with the expansion of space, measured by the stretching of light from nearby galaxies. Using the apparent outward velocity at each distance, they then calculated the Hubble constant.

To gauge the distances between nearby galaxies, his team used a special type of star as cosmic yardsticks or milepost markers. These pulsating stars, called Cepheid variables, brighten and dim at rates that correspond to their intrinsic brightness. By comparing their intrinsic brightness with their apparent brightness as seen from Earth, scientists can calculate their distances.

Gaia further refined this yardstick by geometrically measuring the distance to 50 Cepheid variables in the Milky Way. These measurements were combined with precise measurements of their brightnesses from Hubble. This allowed the astronomers to more accurately calibrate the Cepheids and then use those seen outside the Milky Way as milepost markers.

“When you use Cepheids, you need both distance and brightness,” explained Riess. Hubble provided the information on brightness, and Gaia provided the parallax information needed to accurately determine the distances. Parallax is the apparent change in an object’s position due to a shift in the observer’s point of view. Ancient Greeks first used this technique to measure the distance from Earth to the Moon.

“Hubble is really amazing as a general-purpose observatory, but Gaia is the new gold standard for calibrating distance. It is purpose-built for measuring parallax—this is what it was designed to do,” Stefano Casertano of Space Telescope Science Institute and a member of the SHOES Team added. “Gaia brings a new ability to recalibrate all past distance measures, and it seems to confirm our previous work. We get the same answer for the Hubble constant if we replace all previous calibrations of the distance ladder with just the Gaia parallaxes. It’s a crosscheck between two very powerful and precise observatories.”

The goal of Riess’ team is to work with Gaia to cross the threshold of refining the Hubble constant to a value of only one percent by the early 2020s. Meanwhile, astrophysicists will likely continue to grapple with revisiting their ideas about the physics of the early universe.

The Riess team's latest results are published in the July 12 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.

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Related Links

This site is not responsible for content found on external links

• The science paper by A. Riess et al.
• NASA's Hubble Portal

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Contacts

Ann Jenkins / Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
410-338-4488 / 410-338-4514
jenkins@stsci.edu/ villard@stsci.edu

Adam Riess
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Maryland
410-516-4474
ariess@stsci.edu

Source: HubbleSite/News

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A Giant Stellar Void in the Milky Way

An artist's impression of the implied distribution of young stars, represented here by Cepheids shown as blue stars plotted on the background of a drawing of the Milky Way. With the exception of a small clump in the Galactic centre, the central 8000 light years appear to have very few Cepheids, and hence very few young stars. Credit: The University of Tokyo. Click for a full size image

A major revision is required in our understanding of our Milky Way Galaxy according to an international team led by Prof Noriyuki Matsunaga of the University of Tokyo. The Japanese, South African and Italian astronomers find that there is a huge region around the centre of our own Galaxy, which is devoid of young stars. The team publish their work in a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy containing many billions of stars, with our Sun about 26,000 light years from its centre. Measuring the distribution of these stars is crucial to our understanding of how our Galaxy formed and evolved. Pulsating stars called Cepheids are ideal for this. They are much younger (between 10 and 300 million years old) than our Sun (4.6 billion years old) and they pulsate in brightness in a regular cycle. The length of this cycle is related to the luminosity of the Cepheid, so if astronomers monitor them they can establish how bright the star really is, compare it with what we see from Earth, and work out its distance.

Despite this, finding Cepheids in the inner Milky Way is difficult, as the Galaxy is full of interstellar dust which blocks out light and hides many stars from view. Matsunaga's team compensated for this, with an analysis of near-infrared observations made with a Japanese-South African telescope located at Sutherland, South Africa. To their surprise they found hardly any Cepheids in a huge region stretching for thousands of light years from the core of the Galaxy.

Noriyuki Matsunaga explains: "We already found some while ago that there are Cepheids in the central heart of our Milky Way (in a region about 150 light years in radius). Now we find that outside this there is a huge Cepheid desert extending out to 8000 light years from the centre."

This suggests that a large part of our Galaxy, called the Extreme Inner Disk, has no young stars. Co-author Michael Feast notes: "Our conclusions are contrary to other recent work, but in line with the work of radio astronomers who see no new stars being born in this desert."

Another author, Giuseppe Bono, points out: "The current results indicate that there has been no significant star formation in this large region over hundreds of millions years. The movement and the chemical composition of the new Cepheids are helping us to better understand the formation and evolution of the Milky Way."

Cepheids have more typically been used to measure the distances of objects in the distant Universe, and the new work is an example instead of the same technique revealing the structure of our own Milky Way.

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Media contacts

Ms Kanako Takeda
The University of Tokyo
Japan
kouhou.s@gs.mail.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Thami Nkwanyane
University of Cape Town
Tel: +27 21 650 5672
thami.nkwanyane@uct.ac.za

Thembela Mantungwa
South African Astronomical Observatory
Tel: +27 21 460 9319
tm@saao.ac.za

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Science contacts

Prof Noriyuki Matsunaga
The University of Tokyo
Japan
matsunaga@astron.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Prof Michael Feast
University of Cape Town and
South African Astronomical Observatory
Tel: +27 21 650 2396
mwf@ast.uct.ac.za

Prof Giuseppe Bono
University of Rome Tor Vergata
Italy
bono@roma2.infn.it

Prof Marco Galliani
INAF
Italy
marco.galliani@inaf.it

Prof Marco Malaspina
INAF
Italy
marco.malaspina@inaf.it

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Further information

The new work appears in "A lack of classical Cepheids in the inner part of the Galactic disc", N. Matsunaga, M. Feast, G. Bono, N. Kobayashi, L. Inno, T. Nagayama, S. Nishiyama, Y. Matsuoka and T. Nagata (Kyoto), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Oxford University Press, in press.

A preprint of the paper is available on the arXiv

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Notes for Editors

The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), founded in 1820, encourages and promotes the study of astronomy, solar-system science, geophysics and closely related branches of science. The RAS organizes scientific meetings, publishes international research and review journals, recognizes outstanding achievements by the award of medals and prizes, maintains an extensive library, supports education through grants and outreach activities and represents UK astronomy nationally and internationally. Its more than 4000 members (Fellows), a third based overseas, include scientific researchers in universities, observatories and laboratories as well as historians of astronomy and others.

The RAS accepts papers for its journals based on the principle of peer review, in which fellow experts on the editorial boards accept the paper as worth considering. The Society issues press releases based on a similar principle, but the organisations and scientists concerned have overall responsibility for their content.

Follow the RAS on Twitter

Source:  Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)

Hubble finds Universe may be expanding faster than expected

PR Image heic1611a

Cosmic distance ladder

PR Image heic1611b

Cepheids in UGC 9391

PR Image heic1611c

UGC 9391 

Videos

 

PR Video heic1611a

Animation of cosmic distance ladder

Astronomers have used Hubble to measure the distances to stars in nineteen galaxies more accurately than previously possible. They found that the Universe is currently expanding faster than the rate derived from measurements of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang. If confirmed, this apparent inconsistency may be an important clue to understanding three of the Universe’s most elusive components: dark matter, dark energy and neutrinos.

A team of astronomers, led by Nobel Laureate Adam Riess and using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, have discovered that the Universe is expanding between five and nine percent faster than previously calculated. This is in clear discrepancy with the rate predicted from measurements of the infant Universe.

“This surprising finding may be an important clue to understanding those mysterious parts of the Universe that make up 95 percent of everything and don’t emit light, such as dark energy, dark matter, and dark radiation,” explains Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, USA.

One possible explanation for this unexpectedly fast expansion of the Universe is a new type of subatomic particle that may have changed the balance of energy in the early Universe, so called dark radiation.

The team made the discovery by refining the measurement of how fast the Universe is expanding, a value called the Hubble constant, to unprecedented accuracy, reducing the uncertainty to only 2.4 percent [1].

This new measurement presents a puzzle because it does not agree with the expansion rate found by looking at the moments shortly after the Big Bang. Measurements of the afterglow from the Big Bang from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite mission yield smaller predictions for the Hubble constant.

Comparing the Universe’s expansion rate as calculated by WMAP and Planck (for the time after the Big Bang) and Hubble (for our modern Universe) is like building a bridge, Riess explains: “You start at two ends, and you expect to meet in the middle if all of your drawings are right and your measurements are right. But now the ends are not quite meeting in the middle and we want to know why.”

This refined determination of the Hubble constant was made possible by making precise measurements of the distances to both nearby and faraway galaxies using Hubble [2]. The improved distance measurements were made by streamlining and strengthening the cosmic distance ladder, which astronomers use to measure accurate distances to galaxies. The team compared these measured distances with the expansion of space as measured by the stretching of light from receding galaxies and these two values were then used to calculate the Hubble constant.

The team is continuing to use Hubble with the aim of reducing the uncertainty in the Hubble constant even further, their goal being to reach an uncertainty of just 1 percent. Current telescopes such as the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, and future telescopes such as the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) could also help astronomers make better measurements of the expansion rate and lead to a better understanding of our Universe and the laws that govern it.

Notes

[1] Before Hubble was launched in 1990, estimates of the Hubble constant varied by a factor of two. In the late 1990s the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale refined the value of the Hubble constant to within 10 percent, accomplishing one of the telescope’s key goals. The new, improved Hubble constant value is 73.02 kilometres per second per Megaparsec (where one Megaparsec is equivalent to 3.26 million light-years).

[2] For the calibration of relatively short distances the team observed Cepheid variables. These are pulsating stars which fade and brighten at rates that are proportional to their true brightness and this property allows astronomers to determine their distances. The researchers calibrated the distances to the Cepheids using a basic geometrical technique called parallax. With Hubble’s sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), they extended the parallax measurements further than previously possible, across the Milky Way galaxy. To get accurate distances to nearby galaxies, the team then looked for galaxies containing both Cepheids and Type Ia supernovae. Type Ia supernovae always have the same intrinsic brightness and are also bright enough to be seen at relatively large distances. By comparing the observed brightness of both types of stars in those nearby galaxies, the team could then accurately measure the true brightness of the supernova. Using this calibrated rung on the distance ladder the accurate distance to additional 300 type Ia supernovae in far-flung galaxies was calculated.

More Information

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

The international team of astronomers in this study consists of Adam G. Riess (John Hopkins University, USA; STScI, USA), Lucas M. Macri (Texas A&M University, USA), Samantha L. Hoffmann (Texas A&M University, USA), Dan Scolnic (John Hopkins University, USA; University of Chicago, USA), Stefano Casertano (STScI, USA), Alexei V. Filippenko (University of California Berkeley, USA), Brad E. Tucker (University of California Berkeley, USA; Australian National University, Australia), Mark J. Reid (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA), David O. Jones (John Hopkins University, USA), Jeffrey M. Silverman (University of Texas, USA), Ryan Chornock (Ohio University, USA), Peter Challis (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA), Wenlong Yuan (Texas A&M University, USA),and Ryan J. Foley (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA).

Image credit: NASA, ESA

Links

• Images of Hubble
• Link to hubblesite release
• Link to science paper

Contacts

Adam Riess
Space Telescope Science Institute
Baltimore, USA
Tel: +1 410 516 4474
Email: ariess@stsci.edu

Mathias Jäger
ESA/Hubble, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Cell: +49 176 62397500
Email: mjaeger@partner.eso.org

Source: ESA/Hubble - Space Telescope/news

VISTA Discovers New Component of Milky Way

PR Image eso1542a

VISTA finds hidden feature of Milky Way

Videos

 

PR Video eso1542a

VISTA finds hidden feature of Milky Way

PR Video eso1542b

VISTA finds hidden feature of Milky Way

Astronomers using the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory have discovered a previously unknown component of the Milky Way. By mapping out the locations of a class of stars that vary in brightness called Cepheids, a disc of young stars buried behind thick dust clouds in the central bulge has been found.

The Vista Variables in the Vía Láctea Survey (VVV) [1] ESO public survey is using the VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory to take multiple images at different times of the central parts of the galaxy at infrared wavelengths [2]. It is discovering huge numbers of new objects, including variable stars, clusters and exploding stars (eso1101, eso1128, eso1141).

A team of astronomers, led by Istvan Dékány of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, has now used data from this survey, taken between 2010 and 2014, to make a remarkable discovery — a previously unknown component of our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

“The central bulge of the Milky Way is thought to consist of vast numbers of old stars. But the VISTA data has revealed something new — and very young by astronomical standards!” says Istvan Dékány, lead author of the new study.

Analysing data from the survey, the astronomers found 655 candidate variable stars of a type called Cepheids. These stars expand and contract periodically, taking anything from a few days to months to complete a cycle and changing significantly in brightness as they do so.

The time taken for a Cepheid to brighten and fade again is longer for those that are brighter and shorter for the dimmer ones. This remarkably precise relationship, which was discovered in 1908 by American astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt, makes the study of Cepheids one of the most effective ways to measure the distances to, and map the positions of, distant objects in the Milky Way and beyond.

But there is a catch — Cepheids are not all the same — they come in two main classes, one much younger than the other. Out of their sample of 655 the team identified 35 stars as belonging to a sub-group called classical Cepheids — young bright stars, very different from the usual, much more elderly, residents of the central bulge of the Milky Way.

The team gathered information on the brightness, pulsation period, and deduced the distances of these 35 classical Cepheids. Their pulsation periods, which are closely linked to their age, revealed their surprising youth.

“All of the 35 classical Cepheids discovered are less than 100 million years old. The youngest Cepheid may even be only around 25 million years old, although we cannot exclude the possible presence of even younger and brighter Cepheids,” explains the study’s second author Dante Minniti, of the Universidad Andres Bello, Santiago, Chile.

The ages of these classical Cepheids provide solid evidence that there has been a previously unconfirmed, continuous supply of newly formed stars into the central region of the Milky Way over the last 100 million years. But, this wasn’t to be the only remarkable discovery from the survey’s dataset.

Mapping the Cepheids that they discovered, the team traced an entirely new feature in the Milky Way — a thin disc of young stars across the galactic bulge. This new component to our home galaxy had remained unknown and invisible to previous surveys as it was buried behind thick clouds of dust. Its discovery demonstrates the unique power of VISTA, which was designed to study the Milky Way’s deep structures by wide-field, high-resolution imaging at infrared wavelengths.

“This study is a powerful demonstration of the unmatched capabilities of the VISTA telescope for probing extremely obscured galactic regions that cannot be reached by any other current or planned surveys,” remarks Dékány.

“This part of the galaxy was completely unknown until our VVV survey found it!” adds Minniti.

Further investigations are now needed to assess whether these Cepheids were born close to where they are now, or whether they originate from further out. Understanding their fundamental properties, interactions, and evolution is key in the quest to understand the evolution of the Milky Way, and the process of galaxy evolution as a whole.

Notes

[1] The VVV survey is observing the central parts of our galaxy in five near-infrared bands. The total area of this survey is 520 square degrees and contains at least 355 open and 33 globular clusters. The VVV is multi-epoch in nature in order to detect a large number of variable objects and will provide more than 100 carefully spaced observations at different times for each part of the sky covered. A catalogue with about a billion point sources including about a million variable objects is expected. These will be used to create a three-dimensional map of the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy.

[2] The dust clouds in interstellar space absorb and scatter visible light very effectively and make them opaque. But at longer wavelengths, such as those observed by VISTA, the clouds are much more transparent, allowing the regions beyond the dust to be probed.

More Information

This research was presented in a paper entitled “The VVV Survey reveals classical Cepheids tracing a young and thin stellar disk across the Galaxy’s bulge”, by I. Dékány et al., in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The team is composed of I. Dékány (Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile), D. Minniti (Universidad Andres Bello, Santiago, Chile; Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica MAS and Basal CATA, Santiago, Chile; and Vatican Observatory, Vatican City State), D. Majaess (Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; Mount Saint Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) , M. Zoccali (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile), G. Hajdu (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile), J. Alonso-García (Universidad de Antofagasta, Antofagasta, Chile; Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile), M. Catelan (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile), W. Gieren (Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile; Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile) and J. Borissova (Universidad de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile; Instituto Milenio de Astrofísica, Santiago, Chile).

ESO is the foremost intergovernmental astronomy organisation in Europe and the world’s most productive ground-based astronomical observatory by far. It is supported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, along with the host state of Chile. ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make important scientific discoveries. ESO also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astronomical research. ESO operates three unique world-class observing sites in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. At Paranal, ESO operates the Very Large Telescope, the world’s most advanced visible-light astronomical observatory and two survey telescopes. VISTA works in the infrared and is the world’s largest survey telescope and the VLT Survey Telescope is the largest telescope designed to exclusively survey the skies in visible light. ESO is a major partner in ALMA, the largest astronomical project in existence. And on Cerro Armazones, close to Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre European Extremely Large Telescope, the E-ELT, which will become “the world’s biggest eye on the sky”.

Links

• Research paper
• VVV Survey webpages
• Photos of VISTA

Contacts

Istvan Dékány
Instituto Milenio de Astrofí­sica, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Santiago, Chile
Email: idekany@astro.puc.cl

Dante Minniti
Universidad Andres Bello
Santiago, Chile
Tel: +56 2 2661 8732
Email: dante@astrofisica.cl

Daniel Majaess
Saint Mary’s University, Mount Saint Vincent University
Halifax, Canada
Email: dmajaess@ap.smu.ca

Richard Hook
ESO Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

Source: ESO