ESO – Astronomy Now

The Flame Nebula shines in mesmerising SuperCam image of Orion

5 January 2022 Astronomy Now

The Flame Nebula in Orion, photobombed by the Horsehead Nebula, blazes in a newly processed image captured by the SuperCam instrument at the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment.

A shining stellar nursery amid vast bubbles of heated hydrogen

7 May 2021 Astronomy Now

Softly glowing emission nebulae like SH 2-305 serve as spectacular stellar nurseries where hydrogen gas serves as the raw material for starbirth on a grand scale.

Supermassive black hole ‘spaghettifies’ doomed star in tidal disruption event

12 October 2020 Astronomy Now

Catching a tidal disruption event early allowed astronomers to follow along as a supermassive black hole devoured a passing star.

A familiar face-on spiral hosts stars galore and a supermassive black hole

7 September 2020 Astronomy Now

The spiral galaxy M61, mistaken for a comet by Charles Messier in 1779, is an anchor tenant of the Virgo galaxy cluster, a beehive of rapid star birth.

A cosmic seagull soaring through space on wings of ionised gas

7 August 2019 Astronomy Now

The European Southern Observatory’s VLT Survey Telescope caught the Seagull Nebula in flight on the border between Canis Major and Monoceros 3,700 light years away, a vast assembly of hot gas and dust giving birth to new stars.

Planet-hunting telescopes capture intriguing view of Centaurus A

1 August 2019 Astronomy Now

The SPECULOOS planet-hunting telescopes at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile captured a spectacular view of Centaurus A, a galaxy 11 million light years away harbouring the nearest active galactic nuclei, a supermassive black hole 100 million times more massive than the Sun.

Celestial cat meets cosmic lobster

3 February 2017 Stephen Clark

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 one.

First signs of weird quantum property of empty space?

30 November 2016 Astronomy Now

By studying the polarisation of light emitted from an extraordinarily dense and strongly magnetised neutron star using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers may have found the first observational indications of a strange quantum effect known as vacuum birefringence, first predicted in the 1930s.

‘Pillars of destruction’ in the Carina Nebula

2 November 2016 Astronomy Now

Spectacular new observations of vast pillar-like structures within the Carina Nebula have been made using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The different pillars analysed by an international team seem to be pillars of destruction — in contrast to the name of the iconic Pillars of Creation in the Eagle Nebula, which are of similar nature.

Unexpected gaseous haloes detected around distant quasars

26 October 2016 Astronomy Now

An international team of astronomers has discovered glowing gas clouds surrounding distant quasars. The new survey of these active galaxies indicates that haloes around quasars are far more common than expected. The properties of the haloes in this surprising find are also in striking disagreement with currently accepted theories of galaxy formation in the early universe.