Magazine

This is an artist's concept of the Saturnian plasma sheet based on data from Cassini magnetospheric imaging instrument. Image credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL

This is an artist's impression of the exoplanet, Fomalhaut b, orbiting its sun, Fomalhaut. (Credit: ESA; Hubble, M. Kornmesser; and ESO, L. Calçada and L. L. Christensen)

The globular star cluster Messier 4. (c) ESO

Saturn

Exoplanets

La Silla Observatory

'Tis the Season -- for Plasma Changes at Saturn

New Study Brings a Doubted Exoplanet 'Back from the Dead'

A Cluster with a Secret

Researchers working with data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have discovered one way the bubble of charged particles around Saturn -- known as the magnetosphere -- changes with the planet's seasons.
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A second look at data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is reanimating the claim that the nearby star Fomalhaut hosts a massive exoplanet. The study suggests that the planet, named Fomalhaut b, is a rare and possibly unique object that is...
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A new image from ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the spectacular globular star cluster Messier 4. This ball of tens of thousands of ancient stars is one of the closest and most studied of the globular clusters and recent work has revealed...
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Magazine

This artist's concept shows what astronomers believe is an alien world just two-thirds the size of Earth -- one of the smallest on record. It was identified by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The exoplanet candidate, known as UCF-1.01, orbits a star called GJ 436, which is located a mere 33 light-years away. UCF-1.01 might be the nearest world to our solar system that is smaller than our home planet. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows five moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle marks the newly discovered moon, designated P5, as photographed by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on July 7. The observations will help scientists in their planning for the July 2015 flyby of Pluto by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. P4 was uncovered in Hubble imagery in 2011. (Credit: NASA; ESA; M. Showalter, SETI Institute)

Seen here in this artist's concept, the planet is called 55 Cancri e. It's a toasty world that rushes around its star every 18 hours. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Exoplanets

Solar System

Spitzer

Spitzer Finds Possible Exoplanet Smaller Than Earth

Hubble Discovers a Fifth Moon Orbiting Pluto

NASA's Spitzer Sees the Light of Alien 'Super Earth'

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is a planet two-thirds the size of Earth. The exoplanet candidate, called UCF-1.01, is located a mere 33 light-years away, making it possibly the nearest world to our...
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A team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter...
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a "super-Earth" planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward the eventual search for signs of life on...
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Magazine

An SDO image captured on June 7, 2011, during which an eruption of solar material mushroomed up and fell down to what appeared to be nearly half the sun's surface. Credit: NASA/SDO and the AIA science team

The camera shows the plumes changing to cells and back to plumes again, based on the observatory's perspective during the interval June 7-14, 2011. Credit: NASA/STEREO/NRL

The globular cluster "Messier 9" (c) NASA

Solar Dynamics Observatory

Sun

Hubble

SDO Highlights On Its Anniversary

SDO and STEREO Spot Something New On the Sun

Hubble Sees Glittering Jewels of Messier 9

In April of 2010, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) released its first images, an event known for any telescope as "first light." Since then SDO has continually observed the ever-changing sun on quiet days and explosive ones: there have been...
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Scientists find giant plumes on the sun, newly named "coronal cells" that are over 18,000 miles across, looking like candlesticks on a birthday cake.
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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over...
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The James Webb Space Telescope's Engineering Design Unit (EDU) primary mirror segment, coated with gold by Quantum Coating Incorporated. Credit: Drew Noel

Artist illustration of events on the sun changing the conditions in Near-Earth space. Credit: NASA

This composite image shows the distribution of dark matter, galaxies, and hot gas in the core of the merging galaxy cluster Abell 520, formed from a violent collision of massive galaxy clusters. (C) NASA

JWT

Solar Activities

Cosmology

The Amazing Technology That Crafted the Webb Telescope Technology

Storms From the Sun

Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation

The creation of the next generation James Webb Space Telescope was only possible as a result of imagining and developing the industrial machines that would make it a reality. In the near future, some of that industrial technology could be in an...
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Space weather starts at the sun. It begins with an eruption such as a huge burst of light and radiation called a solar flare or a gigantic cloud of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME). But the effects of those eruptions happen at...
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Astronomers using data from NASA's Hubble Telescope have observed what appears to be a clump of dark matter left behind from a wreck between massive clusters of galaxies. The result could challenge current theories about dark matter that predict...
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Magazine

This all-sky image shows the distribution of carbon monoxide (CO), a molecule used by astronomers to trace molecular clouds across the sky, as seen by Planck. Image credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity with an inset showing calibration targets to be used by a camera at the end of the robotic arm. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astrophysics

Planck Mission

Mars Rover

Preview of a Forthcoming Supernova

Planck All-Sky Images Show Cold Gas and Strange Haze

Mars-Bound NASA Rover Carries Coin for Camera Checkup

Eta Carinae is not only interesting because of its past, but also because of its future. It is one of the closest stars to Earth that is likely to explode in a supernova in the relatively near future.
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New images from the Planck mission show previously undiscovered islands of star formation and a mysterious haze of microwave emissions in our Milky Way galaxy. The views give scientists new treasures to mine and take them closer to understanding...
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The camera at the end of the robotic arm on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has its own calibration target, a smartphone-size plaque that looks like an eye chart supplemented with color chips and an attached penny.
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Magazine

This mosaic of images taken in mid-January 2012 shows the windswept vista northward (left) to northeastward (right) from the location where NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is spending its fifth Martian winter, an outcrop informally named "Greeley Haven." Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

An artist’s rendering of the most distant quasar

Mars

Pandora’s Cluster

discovery

Opportunity Beginning Ninth Year of Mars Work

A Galactic Crash Investigation

Most Distant Quasar Found

Eight years after landing on Mars for what was planned as a three-month mission, NASA's enduring Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is working on what essentially became a new mission five months ago.
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A team of scientists has studied the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora’s Cluster. They have pieced together the cluster’s complex and violent history using telescopes in space and on the ground, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope and...
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A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope and a host of other telescopes to discover and study the most distant quasar found to date. This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the...
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Magazine

ESO’s Very Large Telescope

A spiral galaxy that resembles our Milky Way

nebula NGC 3582

Looking Deep into a Huge Storm on Saturn

A Postcard from Extragalactic Space?

Celestial Fireworks from Dying Stars

ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has teamed up with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to study a rare storm in the atmosphere of the planet Saturn in more detail than has ever been possible before. The new study by an international team will appear this...
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ESO astronomers have used the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope to capture an image of NGC 6744. This impressive spiral galaxy lies about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). But this...
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This image of the nebula NGC 3582, which was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, shows giant loops of gas bearing a striking resemblance to solar prominences. These loops are...
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Observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope

Curious features

Redshift for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad

Discovery

A Disturbed Galactic Duo

Update for Redshift-Astronomy-App

A Very Cool Pair of Brown Dwarfs

The galaxies in this cosmic pairing, captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, display some curious features, demonstrating that each member of the duo is close enough to feel the...
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Our new Update includes a great number of features as Russian and Spanish language:
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Observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, along with two other telescopes, have shown that there is a new candidate for the coldest known star: a brown dwarf in a double system with about the same temperature as a...
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nebula NGC 3582

Celestial Fireworks from Dying Stars

Magazine

NASA's Cassini spacecraft chronicles the change of seasons as it captures clouds concentrated near the equator of Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

Methane clouds in the troposphere, the lowest part of the atmosphere, appear white here and are mostly near Titan's equator. The darkest areas are surface features that have a low albedo, meaning they do not reflect much light. Cassini observations of clouds like these provide evidence of a seasonal shift of Titan's weather systems to low latitudes following the August 2009 equinox in the Saturnian system. (During equinox, the sun lies directly over the equator. See PIA11667 to learn how the sun's illumination of the Saturnian system changed during the equinox transition to spring in the northern hemispheres and to fall in the southern hemispheres of the planet and its moons.)

A view from the bustling center of our galactic metropolis. Spitzer Space Telescope offers us a fresh, infrared view of the frenzied scene at the center of our Milky Way, revealing what lies behind the dust.

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.

Equatorial Titan Clouds

Our Milky Way

New-born stars wreak havoc in their nursery

Cassini Sees Seasonal Rains Transform Titan's Surface

Stars Gather in 'Downtown' Milky Way

The Drama of Starbirth

As spring continues to unfold at Saturn, April showers on the planet's largest moon, Titan, have brought methane rain to its equatorial deserts, as revealed in images captured by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. This is the first time scientists have...
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The region around the center of our Milky Way galaxy glows colorfully in this new version of an image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
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A new image from ESO’s Very Large Telescope gives a close-up view of the dramatic effects new-born stars have on the gas and dust from which they formed. Although the stars themselves are not visible, material they have ejected is colliding with...
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Magazine

NASA's Dawn spacecraft, powered by ion propulsion, is carrying three different instruments to the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Alongside a spectrometer from the Italian space agency (Agencia Spaziale Italia; ASI) and a gamma ray and neutron detector from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is a German camera system, referred to as a 'framing camera', on board.

This image is a composite of very long exposures taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and the NAOJ’s Subaru telescope on Hawaii. Most of the visible objects are very faint and distant galaxies. The clump of faint red objects to the right of centre is the most remote mature cluster of galaxies yet found.

Redshift for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad

Vesta - an asteroid in 3D

Young, but surprisingly grown-up

Become a fan on facebook and win a Redshift version

Dawn spacecraft orbiting Vesta

The Most Distant Mature Galaxy Cluster

Since its release our Redshift App for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad has shown an unrivaled triumph. Hundreds of new users each day in 78 countries daily are exploring galaxies...
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What might asteroid Vesta look like? In a new animation, researchers at the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) have recreated the asteroid in 3D. In the animation, the asteroid is irregularly shaped, has a...
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Astronomers have used an armada of telescopes on the ground and in space, including the Very Large Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile to discover and measure the distance to the most remote mature cluster of galaxies yet found....
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Magazine

This image from orbit covers an area about 460 meters (about 1,500 feet) across, in which carbonate minerals have been identified from spectrometer observations. Fractures and possible layers are visible in the light-toned rock exposure containing the carbonates.

The location is inside an unnamed crater about 35 kilometers (22 miles) in diameter that is on the uplifted rim of Huygens crater, which is 467 kilometers (290 miles) in diameter. The excavations by the impacts that dug first Huygens and then the smaller crater have exposed material in this image that had been buried an estimated 5 kilometers (3 miles) deep. The carbonates may be from part of an extensive buried layer that could hold much of the carbon that was once in a thick Martian atmosphere of carbon dioxide, some researchers propose. Mars now has a thin atmosphere that is mostly carbon dioxide, but evidence that liquid water was once widespread on the surface suggests the atmosphere was much thicker billions of years ago.

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter provided this image. Identification of iron or calcium carbonates at this site, and also of clay minerals indicating a formerly wet environment, comes from an observation by the Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) on the same orbiter. In the presence of water and other conditions, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be captured into carbonate minerals.

The image is presented in false color, making differences in surface composition more visible than they would appear to the human eye. It combines information collected separately in red, blue-green, and near-infrared wavelengths.

The image is from HiRISE observation ESP_012897_168, made on April 27, 2009, and centered at 11.6 degrees south latitude, 51.9 degrees east longitude. Other image products from this observation are available at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu/ESP_012897_1685 .

HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., led the effort to build the CRISM instrument and operates CRISM in coordination with an international team of researchers from universities, government and the private sector. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is NASA's industry partner for the mission and built the spacecraft.

This image of NGC 247, taken by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, reveals the fine details of this highly inclined spiral galaxy and its rich backdrop. Astronomers say this highly tilted orientation, when viewed from Earth, explains why the distance to this prominent galaxy was previously overestimated.

This artist’s impression shows the disc around the young star T Cha. Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope this disc has been found to be in two parts, a narrow ring close to the star and the remainder of the disc material much further out. A companion object, seen in the foreground, has been detected in the gap in the disc that may be either a brown dwarf or a large planet. The inner dust disc is lost in the glare of the star on this picture.

Fractures in Carbonate-Bearing Rocks at Mars' Huygens Basin

A spiral galaxy

The young star T Cha

Some of Mars' Missing Carbon Dioxide May be Buried

The Dusty Disc of NGC 247

Planet Formation in Action?

Rocks on Mars dug from far underground by crater-blasting impacts are providing glimpses of one possible way Mars' atmosphere has become much less dense than it used to be.

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The spiral galaxy NGC 247 is one of the closest spiral galaxies of the southern sky. In this new view from the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope in Chile large numbers of the galaxy’s component stars are clearly resolved and many...
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Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope an international team of astronomers has been able to study the short-lived disc of material around a young star that is in the early stages of making a planetary system. For the first time a smaller companion could...
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Magazine

A region of the sky called the "Lockman Hole," located in the constellation of Ursa Major, is one of the areas surveyed in infrared light by the Herschel Space Observatory. All of the little dots in this picture are distant galaxies. The pattern of their collective light is what's known as the cosmic infrared background. By studying this pattern, astronomers were able to measure how much dark matter it takes to create a galaxy bursting with young stars.

Regions like this one are almost completely devoid of objects in our Milky Way galaxy, making them ideal for astronomers studying galaxies in the distant universe.

This new image of the reflection nebula Messier 78 was captured using the Wide Field Imager camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile. This colour picture was created from many monochrome exposures taken through blue, yellow/green and red filters, supplemented by exposures through a filter that isolates light from glowing hydrogen gas. The total exposure times were 9, 9, 17.5 and 15.5 minutes per filter, respectively.

This swirling landscape of stars is known as the North American nebula. In visible light, the region resembles North America, but in this new infrared view from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the continent disappears.

Where did the continent go? The reason you don't see it in Spitzer's view has to do, in part, with the fact that infrared light can penetrate dust whereas visible light cannot. Dusty, dark clouds in the visible image become transparent in Spitzer's view. In addition, Spitzer's infrared detectors pick up the glow of dusty cocoons enveloping baby stars.

Clusters of young stars (about one million years old) can be found throughout the image. Slightly older but still very young stars (about 3 to 5 million years) are also liberally scattered across the complex, with concentrations near the "head" region of the Pelican nebula, which is located to the right of the North American nebula (upper right portion of this picture).

Some areas of this nebula are still very thick with dust and appear dark even in Spitzer's view. For example, the dark "river" in the lower left-center of the image -- in the Gulf of Mexico region -- are likely to be the youngest stars in the complex (less than a million years old).

The Spitzer image contains data from both its infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer. Light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns has been color-coded blue; 4.5-micron light is blue-green; 5.8-micron and 8.0-micron light are green; and 24-micron light is red.

Lockman Hole

Messier 78: a reflection nebula in Orion

An Extended Stellar Family

Herschel Measures Dark Matter for Star-Forming Galaxies

Reflected Glory

New View of Family Life in the North American Nebula

The Herschel Space Observatory has revealed how much dark matter it takes to form a new galaxy bursting with stars. Herschel is a European Space Agency cornerstone mission supported with important NASA contributions.

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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...
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Stars at all stages of development, from dusty little tots to young adults, are on display in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
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Magazine

During its one-year mission, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mapped the entire sky in infrared light. Among the multitudes of astronomical bodies that have been discovered by the NEOWISE portion of the WISE mission are 20 comets.

This collage shows those 20 new comets all together in a kind of family portrait. Most of the comets are named WISE. In four cases, the comet does not bear the name WISE because the object was known before to be an asteroid. The WISE observations revealed their true nature. These objects did not turn out to be stony and/or metallic space rocks as is the case for asteroids. Instead, they were shown to be comets -- snowy dust balls with clouds of dust and gas surrounding them.

When most people think of comets, they think of the popular images of Halley's Comet or Comet Hale-Bopp, with bright, enormous tails. A comet tail forms as the object travels closer to the sun. The ices in the comet are heated and become a gas, escaping the surface of the comet and lifting dust particles away as well. This fuzzy cloud around the comet nucleus is called a coma. As a comet gets closer and closer to the sun, the solar wind and sunlight push the coma away, forming the long tail.

Comets are named by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center, and the names indicate the circumstances of discovery. The designations of the comets in the collage, from left to right, top to bottom are: 237P/LINEAR (2002 LN13), 233P/La Sagra (2009 WJ50), P/2009 WX51 (Catalina), P/2010 B2 (WISE), P/2010 D1 (WISE), P/2010 D2 (WISE), C/2010 D3 (WISE), C/2010 D4 (WISE), C/2010 DG56 (WISE), C/2010 E3 (WISE), C/2010 FB87 (WISE-Garradd), C/2010 G3 (WISE), C/2010 J4 (WISE), P/2010 K2 (WISE), C/2010 KW7 (WISE), 237P/LINEAR (2010 L2), C/2010 L4 (WISE), C/2010 L5 (WISE), P/2010 N1 (WISE), and P/2010 P4 (WISE). (Italicized names are the ones that had been previously discovered as minor planets, but were not known to be comets.)

The fuzzy background in each picture is due to random fluctuations in infrared light, primarily from dust in our own solar system. Stars cannot be seen because they are subtracted out during the process of combining multiple WISE pictures together to make this view centered on the moving comets.

The colors in the pictures are representational. Infrared light of 4.6, 12 and 22 microns is colored blue, green and red, respectively. The light emitted from comets in infrared is due to their temperatures, so the cooler objects appear to have more red, while warmer objects will appear more bluish.

This image was created from the first combined image and motion measurements from the AMBER instrument on the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. It shows the mysterious disc of material around the brilliant supergiant star HD 62623. The picture has been colour coded to show the velocities of the material in the disc: blue indicates that the material is coming towards us, and red that it is receding.

This new image of the Orion Nebula was captured using the Wide Field Imager camera on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile. This image is a composite of several exposures taken through a total of five different filters. Light that passed through a red filter, as well as light from a filter that shows the glowing hydrogen gas, is coloured red. Light in the yellow–green part of the spectrum is coloured green, blue light is coloured blue and light that passed through an ultraviolet filter has been coloured purple. The exposure times were about 52 minutes through each filter.

NASA's NEOWISE

First "3D View" from the VLT Interferometer

The Orion Nebula

Scan for Asteroids and Comets

Motions in the disc around a supergiant star revealed

Still Full of Surprises

NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids in the main belt between Mars and...
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The ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) has made its first observations that combine super-sharp imaging with measurements of motion. New pioneering data from the VLTI/AMBER instrument not only show extremely fine details of the gas and...
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This ethereal-looking image of the Orion Nebula was captured using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory, Chile. This nebula is much more than just a pretty face, offering astronomers a close-up view...
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Magazine

The Andromeda Galaxy is our nearest large galactic neighbour, containing several hundred billion stars. Combined, these images show all stages of the stellar life cycle. The infrared image from Herschel shows areas of cool dust that trace reservoirs of gas in which forming stars are embedded. The optical image shows adult stars. XMM-Newton’s X-ray image shows the violent endpoints of stellar evolution, in which individual stars explode or pairs of stars pull each other to pieces.

This new infrared view of the star formation region Messier 8, often called the Lagoon Nebula, was captured by the VISTA telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. This colour picture was created from images taken through J, H and Ks near-infrared filters, and which were acquired as part of a huge survey of the central parts of the Milky Way. The field of view is about 34 by 15 arcminutes.

This artist’s impression shows a dark gamma-ray burst in a star forming region. Gamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic events in the Universe, but some appear curiously faint in visible light. The biggest study of these dark gamma-ray bursts to date, using the GROND instrument on the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at La Silla in Chile, has found that these gigantic explosions, while puzzling, don't require exotic explanations. Their faintness is now fully explained by a combination of causes with the most important being the presence of dust between the Earth and the explosion.

Our nearest large galactic neighbour

VISTA's infrared view

GROND

Andromeda’s once and future stars

VISTA Stares Deeply into the Blue Lagoon

Light Dawns on Dark Gamma-ray Bursts

Two ESA observatories have combined forces to show the Andromeda Galaxy in a new light. Herschel sees rings of star formation in this, the most detailed image of the Andromeda Galaxy ever taken at infrared wavelengths, and XMM-Newton shows dying...
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This new infrared image of the Lagoon Nebula was captured as part of a five-year study of the Milky Way using ESO’s VISTA telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. This is a small piece of a much larger image of the region surrounding the...
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Gamma-ray bursts are among the most energetic events in the Universe, but some appear curiously faint in visible light. The biggest study to date of these so-called dark gamma-ray bursts, using the GROND instrument on the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO...
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Magazine

The globular cluster Messier 107, also known as NGC 6171, is located about 21 000 light-years away in the constellation of Ophiuchus. Messier 107 is about 13 arcminutes across, which corresponds to about 80 light-years at its distance. As is typical of globular clusters, a population of thousands of old stars in Messier 107 is densely concentrated into a volume that is only about twenty times the distance between our Sun and its nearest stellar neighbour, Alpha Centauri, across. This image was created from exposures taken through blue, green and near-infrared filters, using the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at La Silla Observatory, Chile.

This map shows the distribution of dark matter in a portion of our universe. It was created with the help of "weak gravitational lensing" -- a natural phenomenon that occurs when light from distant galaxies is slightly warped by the mass of galaxies and clumps of dark matter in the foreground. Astronomers use complex imaging software to analyze images of these warped galaxies, and ultimately to create dark matter maps like this one.

This map derives from the largest ever survey performed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope -- the Cosmic Evolution Survey, or COSMOS.

This artist’s impression shows the super-Earth exoplanet orbiting the nearby star GJ 1214. It is the first super-Earth to have its atmosphere analysed. The exoplanet, orbiting a small star only 40 light-years away from us, has a mass about six times that of the Earth. The planet, GJ 1214b appears to be surrounded by an atmosphere that is either dominated by steam or blanketed by thick clouds or hazes. The planet appears as a large crescent in the foreground with its red parent star behind.

The globular star cluster Messier 107

Dark Matter Clumps

Exoplanets

A Swarm of Ancient Stars

So You Think You Can Solve a Cosmology Puzzle?

First Super-Earth Atmosphere Analysed

We know of about 150 of the rich collections of old stars called globular clusters that orbit our galaxy, the Milky Way. This sharp new image of Messier 107, captured by the Wide Field Imager on the 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory...
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Cosmologists have come up with a new way to solve their problems. They are inviting scientists, including those from totally unrelated fields, to participate in a grand competition. The idea is to spur outside interest in one of cosmology's...
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The atmosphere around a super-Earth exoplanet has been analysed for the first time by an international team of astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The planet, which is known as GJ 1214b, was studied as it passed in front of its parent...
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