AAL 2023/24 Annual Report – ESO

Since the beginning of the Australia – European Southern Observatory (ESO) Strategic Partnership in 2017, AAL has overseen activities and stakeholder communications to ensure Australian-based astronomers get the most out of their ESO access.

AAL continued these activities in 2023/24, including tracking the tangible benefits emerging from the current Partnership agreement. AAL’s ESOStats database contains a record of all ESO proposals and publications since Period 101 with one or more Australian investigators/authors. Following a recent upgrade by Astralis-Macquarie’s Data Central, the database allows easy searching of proposals and publications, and has streamlined the reporting to Australian stakeholders including the addition of numerous plots.

There are currently two NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Libraries that can be accessed from the Statistics page of AAL’s ESO Forum:

As of mid-Oct 2024, the first list contains 69 papers, of which almost 15% are published in the most prestigious journals Nature and Science. The second list contains over 1100 papers, about half of which have been published since the start of Australia’s Strategic Partnership with ESO in mid-2017.

AAL routinely collates other data (via annual surveys) from Australian ESO Principal Investigators, providing complementary information to that collected by the ESO Users Committee. 

In terms of providing support for the Australian ESO user community, AAL facilitates an exchange of information via the Australian ESO Forum hosted on the AAL website.

 

Highlights of the Strategic Partnership

Record-breaking fast radio burst discovery highlights synergies between ESO and SKA

A global team led by Macquarie University’s Dr Stuart Ryder and Swinburne University of Technology’s Associate Professor Ryan Shannon has discovered the most distant fast radio burst ever detected, and one of the most energetic. The team determined its location and distance from Earth by using a combination of the world’s best optical and radio telescopes – the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, and the Australian Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Pathfinder radio telescope – a precursor instrument operated by CSIRO known as ASKAP.

For the full story, please see the media release on AAL’s news blog.

Alt text: In this artist’s impression, three cream and pink coloured galaxies are jumbled together in the upper left corner. From this group, a bright yellow streak points towards the bottom right, where it intersects with a dot on a spiral arm of the Milky Way. The Milky Way, with a glowing white centre and blue-purple spiral arms, stands out against the black background faintly speckled with distant galaxies.
This artist’s impression (not to scale) illustrates the path of the fast radio burst FRB 20220610A, from the distant galaxy where it originated all the way to Earth, in one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. The source galaxy of FRB 20220610A, pinned down thanks to ESO’s Very Large Telescope, appears to be located within a small group of interacting galaxies. It’s so far away its light took eight billion years to reach us, making FRB 20220610A the most distant fast radio burst found to date. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser.
MAGPI Magic – a host of papers from Australia’s first ESO Large Programme

The Middle Ages Galaxy Properties with Integral field spectroscopy (MAGPI) Survey is an Australian-led Large Programme, making use of the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) – one of the most sought after instruments on the VLT. MAGPI was awarded a total of 340 hr of observing time. Since the survey began in late-2019, MAGPI has been mapping the properties of approximately 160 galaxies, trying to clarify what transformed galaxies during the Universe’s “Middle Ages” (around 3-4 billion years ago).

A host of papers were published from the MAGPI survey during the 2023/24 period, showcasing some excellent results from this successful Large Programme. Please click on the links below to read more about this fantastic survey (these stories have been written by MAGPI team members and are hosted on AAL’s ESO Blog):

 

Monster black hole devouring one sun every day

The fastest-growing black hole ever recorded has been discovered by researchers at the Australian National University (ANU), who used ESO’s VLT to confirm their results. This particular black hole is devouring the equivalent of one sun every day – with a mass roughly 17 billion times that of our sun. It is also 500 trillion times brighter – which made it even more surprising that it had not been previously detected. First discovered with the ANU 2.3 metre telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in NSW, the research team then turned to one of the largest telescopes in the world – the VLT – to confirm the extraordinary nature of the black hole and measure its mass.  

To find out more about this remarkable discovery, please see the full story on ANU’s website.

The Milky Way hangs over the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in this spellbinding panorama taken at ESO's Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert, Chile. Credit: F. Char/ ESO.

Acknowledgements

Australia’s Strategic Partnership with ESO is made possible by the Australian Government’s Department of Industry, Science and Resources (DISR) under the Access to World Leading Astronomy Infrastructure program. AAL also manages funding from the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) for the national optical instrumentation capability, allowing the Astralis Instrumentation Consortium to work on projects for ESO facilities.