Announcements 2024

14 August 2024: The ESO Annual Report 2023 is now available online. The 2023 report has been comprehensively redesigned and restructured, presenting ESO’s activities from the past year in a new, engaging and more visual way. Among the highlights are: The progress made in the construction programme of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which passed the 50% completion milestone during the past year. A selection of the fascinating scientific results published during 2023 using observations from ESO facilities. Highlights of how ESO has contributed to and engaged with our communities and society, including a celebration of 60 years of ESO in our Host State Chile. News from the La Silla Paranal Observatory and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), including forthcoming instruments and upgrades. Updates on the technology development and R&D activities that keep ESO facilities at the forefront of astronomy. A “What is ESO?” introduction and “ESO’s year in numbers” at the ...

28 June 2024: Today, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) has taken another step towards timely completion. At ESO’s Headquarters in Garching, Germany, and with remote participation from the UK, the organisation signed a contract with Glyndwr Innovations Limited (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wrexham University) in Wales, UK, for the production of the ELT’s M5 commissioning mirror. In case of delays in producing M5, this commissioning mirror will be used as the fifth mirror of the ELT’s innovative five-mirror design when the telescope sees first light. The M5 mirror is a crucial part of the ELT’s adaptive-optics system design: it will adjust its position up to 10 times per second without bending to allow the telescope to obtain the sharpest possible images. Like the rest of the ELT, M5 is pushing technology to its limits: at 2.7 by 2.2 metres, it is the largest tip-tilt mirror ever produced. It is made from silicon carbide, ...

13 June 2024: Yesterday, Chilean President Gabriel Boric visited the ESO Headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany. President Boric was accompanied by a high-level delegation, including Aisén Etcheverry, Minister of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation; Nicolás Grau, Minister of Economy, Development and Tourism; Luis Cordero, Minister of Justice and Human Rights; and Juan Carlos Muñoz, Minister of Transport and Telecommunications. In total, the visiting delegation numbered over 60 people. The visitors were hosted by ESO Director General, Xavier Barcons, and ESO’s top-level management. The visit provided an opportunity for ESO and Chile to review the close relationship developed over 60 years of collaboration and discuss ways of strengthening it. ESO develops its telescopes and instruments in Europe, in strong collaboration with industry and R&D institutions, and operates them at unique observing sites in the Chilean Atacama Desert, which has generated unique opportunities for Chilean academia, companies and society. Following a welcome by the ...

10 June 2024: The Joint Committee ESO-Government of Chile has opened applications for its national financing fund for the period 2024, which will award over 550 million Chilean pesos. The skies in the northern part of the country offer some of the best conditions in the world for astronomical observation. This is why, for over 60 years, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has designed, built, and operated observatories in the north of Chile. La Silla, Paranal, ALMA and the future Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) are part of ESO’s infrastructure, making it the foremost organisation for ground-based astronomical observation. To enhance scientific and technological development through astronomy, since 1995 ESO and the Government of Chile have funded projects that foster astronomical research, training of highly skilled personnel, the development of technologies, and science education and outreach. ESO provides and manages this annual fund as part of the scientific cooperation programme with its host country, ...

5 June 2024: Today, ESO has signed an agreement with an international consortium of institutions for the design and construction of ANDES, the ArmazoNes high Dispersion Echelle Spectrograph. The ANDES instrument will be installed on ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It will be used to search for signs of life in exoplanets and look for the very first stars, as well as to test variations of the fundamental constants of physics and measure the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion. The agreement was signed by ESO’s Director General, Xavier Barcons, and by Roberto Ragazzoni, the President of Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), the institution leading the ANDES consortium. Also attending the signing ceremony were Sergio Maffettone, Consul General of Italy in Munich, and INAF’s Alessandro Marconi, ANDES Principal Investigator, in addition to other representatives from ESO, INAF, the ANDES consortium and the Consulate of Italy in Munich. The signing took place at the ...

21 May 2024: Update The ESO and ALMA Science Archives are back online. Starting on Friday 17 May, several of ESO’s network and communication services were shut down to allow for an important software upgrade to be deployed. The upgrade is being done in response to a cyber security incident. In addition to the shutdown, mitigating this threat included limiting communications regarding the incident to avoid compromising ESO’s cyber security response plan. As of Tuesday 21 May, email services have been restored and the ESO website is back online. Other services, such as the ESO and ALMA Science Archives, are expected to be restored in the coming days. ESO’s IT team is working together with a cyber security consultant on detecting and clearing malicious software from all ESO’s machines, as well as on investigating the attack and its consequences. Should any of our stakeholders be found to be affected, they will be informed ...

15 May 2024: M5, the fifth mirror on the light path of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), has reached an important milestone: its blank, the shaped piece of material that is later polished to become the mirror, has just been finalised. The ELT will be equipped with five mirrors in total, and M5 is the smallest of them — but building its blank was no small feat. The French company Mersen Boostec manufactured this remarkable piece in their facilities near Tarbes, in France’s southwest. M5 is a flat, elliptical mirror measuring 2.7 by 2.2 metres, constructed from six segments brazed together. It might not seem much in comparison to the ELT’s enormous 39-metre primary mirror, but in reality, it is the largest tip-tilt mirror in the world. Together with M4, M5 is a crucial component of the ELT’s adaptive optics system: their unique synergy will allow the ELT to take extremely sharp images, ...

14 May 2024: The Mid-infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph, or METIS, has passed its Final Design Review, with ESO now giving the go-ahead on the manufacturing of all instrument components. METIS is a sophisticated multi-tool instrument that will operate on ESO’s upcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It is the first of the ELT instruments to formally pass its Final Design Review, marking an important step for the METIS consortium, the ELT project, and the instrument-building community. METIS is a first-generation instrument on the world’s biggest eye on the sky, the ELT, meaning it will start operating when or shortly after the telescope itself starts observing the skies. It has a broad range of science goals, from probing the formation history of our Solar System to peering into the centre of galaxies, to studying their enigmatic supermassive black holes. The main scientific focus of METIS is on the study of planet-forming discs, and recently ...

30 April 2024: As part of a collaboration between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and ESO, the Observations of Airglow with Spectrometer and Imager Systems (OASIS) project has officially joined the ranks of ESO’s Paranal Observatory. Best known for hosting world-leading astronomical observatories, like ESO’s Very Large Telescope, Paranal also happens to be ideally suited for certain atmospheric observations. Operated by DLR and hosted by ESO, OASIS aims to show that monitoring “airglow” in our atmosphere has potential to provide early warnings for tsunamis. Tsunamis, giant waves caused mostly by earthquakes under the sea, are a destructive force of nature that can result in a significant loss of life and damage to infrastructure. OASIS aims to show that it is possible to mitigate some of the impacts of these natural hazards by monitoring our atmosphere. Earthquakes generate sound waves that travel upwards through the atmosphere. These perturbations affect the so-called airglow or nightglow ...

29 April 2024: On Monday, April 29th, a delegation from UN Women, an organisation dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women, visited the European Southern Observatory (ESO) offices in Santiago, Chile, to further advance the inclusion of women in astronomical observatories and Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. The delegation, headed by Sima Sami Bahous, UN Women's Executive Director, and María Noel Vaeza, UN Women's Regional Director for the Americas and the Caribbean, was received by Bárbara Nuñez, ESO Regional Relations Officer and Luis Chavarría, ESO Representative in Chile. Bahous also met virtually with Xavier Barcons, ESO Director General, and part of the team of the Chilean Non-Governmental Organisation Ingeniosas, which promotes and supports the inclusion of young girls into STEM fields. During the meeting, the delegations discussed the outcomes of the Memorandum of Understanding between ESO and UN Women, signed in 2020 and renewed earlier this year. This collaboration ...

25 April 2024: Today, Aisén Etcheverry, the Chilean Minister of Science, Technology, Knowledge and Innovation, accompanied by Gonzalo Arenas, the Ministry’s Head of International Relations and Maria Soledad Morales, Chilean Consul to Bavaria and Baden-Wütternberg visited the ESO Headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany. The visit, the first of a Chilean science minister to ESO’s facilities in Germany, provided an opportunity to further strengthen ties between ESO and Chile. The close collaborative relationship between ESO and Chile goes back over 60 years and has allowed the organisation to operate its telescopes at unique observing sites in Chile, while generating business opportunities and contributing to the development of Chilean astronomy. The visitors were hosted by ESO Director General, Xavier Barcons, and ESO’s ‎Head of the Executive Office of the Director General & Head of Legal and Institutional Affairs, Laura Comendador Frutos. Following an opening presentation about ESO’s value chain and its societal impact by ...

14 March 2024: The construction of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the Chilean Atacama Desert has reached a new milestone: a team at ESO’s Paranal Observatory have added a reflective, shiny layer, as well as special sensors, to the first segments of the telescope’s primary mirror. This “coating” means the segments are now essentially ready to start observing the skies, once installed at the heart of the world’s largest optical telescope later this decade. The 39-metre primary mirror of ESO’s ELT, known as M1, will be by far the largest mirror ever made for a telescope. Too large to be made from a single piece of glass, it will consist of 798 glass-ceramic hexagonal segments, each about five centimetres thick and 1.5 metres across. The mirror segments are manufactured in Europe in a multi-step, multinational process. The first 18 made their way across the ocean to Paranal earlier this year, and coating ...

28 February 2024: For the seventh year in a row, observations conducted at ESO’s observatories have led to more than 1000 scientific publications in a year. Recently, the ESO Library, Documentation, and Information Services Department has updated their detailed statistics on publications using ESO data, presenting each facility's contributions in 2023 [1]. The most significant contributions to these publications come from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the VLT Interferometer (VLTI) at Paranal Observatory, which yielded data included in over 600 studies. Highlights include the detection of distant gas clouds with leftovers from the first stars in the Universe and the most distant fast radio burst to date. For the last four years, the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) has been the most productive VLT instrument, producing data for over 200 papers in 2023 alone. Also located at Paranal Observatory, the Visible and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) and the VLT Survey Telescope ...

15 February 2024: Delegations representing 102 countries agreed last week to discuss the impact of large satellite constellations on astronomy at a meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS). After intense discussions, COPUOS’ Scientific and Technical Subcommittee has agreed to add an agenda item for the next five years with the title: "Dark and Quiet Skies, astronomy and large constellations: addressing emerging issues and challenges". As the UN’s top body for space-related matters, the committee deals with all topics related to international cooperation and the exploration of space and planetary bodies, including the deployment of satellites, space debris mitigation, long-term sustainability of space and the use of orbital slots. The proposal championed by ESO’s partner and host state Chile and ESO’s member state Spain — both countries hosting significant international astronomy infrastructure — was informed by the astronomy community and received widespread support from many ...

29 January 2024: Astronomers have, for the first time, made a direct measurement of the mass of a distant black hole, one so far away that light from its surroundings took 11 billion years to reach us. The team, led by Taro Shimizu at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, found the black hole, called J0920, to have a mass of about 320 million times that of the Sun. This achievement, described in a paper published today in Nature, has been made possible thanks to GRAVITY+, a series of ongoing upgrades to ESO’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and its GRAVITY instrument. To directly measure the mass of a black hole, astronomers use telescopes to track the movement of gas and stars around it. The faster these move, the more mass is encased within the material’s orbit. This technique has been used to measure the mass of nearby black holes, ...

16 January 2024: After a 10 000 km journey across the world, the first mirror segments of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) have safely arrived in their next home, the ELT Technical Facility at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. A total of 18 segments (out of 798) of the telescope’s main mirror (M1) successfully made the trip from Europe to South America, first arriving in Chile at the Antofagasta Terminal International (ATI) port last week. Once complete, the ELT’s M1 will be over 39 metres across, making it the world’s largest eye on the sky. Such scale means that the mirror can’t be cast in one piece, thus, 798 hexagonal segments will work together to form M1. An additional 133 will be produced to facilitate the segments’ recoating. Embarking on a remarkable voyage that began near Poitiers, France, where the ELT segments were finished, they then traveled by road to ...

10 January 2024: This week, the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science, Robbert Dijkgraaf, visited ESO facilities in Chile at La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. While visiting for the official inauguration of the BlackGEM telescopes, a Dutch-Belgian project hosted by ESO at its La Silla Observatory, Minister Dijkgraaf took the opportunity of being in Chile to tour all of ESO’s observing sites. At Paranal Observatory, he was also able to visit the nearby construction site of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope. During his visit, Minister Dijkgraaf was welcomed by ESO’s Director General Xavier Barcons. He was accompanied by a high-level delegation, including Mirjam Lieshout-Vijverberg, Vice President and representative for the Netherlands on the ESO Council, and Amina Helmi, also a representative for the country on the ESO Council. The official inauguration of BlackGEM at La Silla also included the participation of the Dutch and Belgian ambassadors to Chile and BlackGEM’s project leader Paul ...