ESO Blog

Spiral wake
22
May

Spiraling in on a protoplanet with SPHERE

Exoplanet surveys have revealed that planets around other stars are common. Yet, we have little understanding of how planets form and what sets their size and composition. One of the most direct ways to better understand planet formation is to detect young planets still embedded in disks of...
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M82
01
Mar

KMOS reveals galactic-scale outflows in the early Universe

The first galaxies in the universe created bubbles of ionized gas that overlapped with each other, which led to the largest phase transition in the history of the universe known as the epoch of reionization (EoR). However, we don't know much about the galaxies involved in the phase-transition...
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08
Feb

The FLAMES of sodium and oxygen in the cluster NGC 1846

It has been known for several decades that globular clusters in the Milky Way display multiple stellar populations. This refers to a cluster having two main stellar groups: a first generation (1G), which are stars that are chemically similar to Milky Way halo stars, and a second generation...
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DG delegation
19
Dec

ESO delegation visits Australia

In our final AAL ESO Blog post for 2022, Romy Pearse (AAL Communications Manager) looks back on a recent highly productive visit to Australia by a delegation led by the Director General of ESO, Prof. Xavier Barcons.
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05
Dec

Using the ESO 3.6 metre telescope to test for variations in the fine structure constant among nearby solar twins

In lieu of an AAL ESO Blog post this month, we encourage our community to read the article that appeared recently in The Conversation by Prof. Michael Murphy from Swinburne University of Technology.
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MUSE on VLT
17
Oct

Tracking Australian VLT publications

As part of AAL's role in assisting the Dept of Industry, Science and Resources in managing Australia's Strategic Partnership with ESO, we monitor not just the proposal submissions and allocations but also any refereed publications involving Australian-based astronomers that use data from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and...
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Fig 1
30
Sep

Measuring reliable stellar abundances towards crowded regions using MUSE

With the rapid development of stellar spectroscopy in the past decade, many stellar spectroscopic surveys, for example LAMOST, GALAH and APOGEE, combined with the astrometric information of Gaia have played a pivotal role in explaining the chemo-dynamic evolution of the Milky Way.
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31
Aug

Australian-based astronomers to take a deep dive into the cosmos with time awarded on one of ESO’s most powerful instruments

In lieu of an AAL ESO Blog post this month, we encourage our community to take a look at the exciting science to be enabled by the recent awarding of ESO Large Programme status to not one, but two Australian-led projects using MUSE, the most-oversubscribed instrument on the...
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Happy face lens
11
Jul

A new sample of gravitational lenses followed up with the VLT and Keck

Gravitational lenses are powerful cosmic "magnifying glasses" that can be used to explore a broad range of astrophysical phenomena in both the background lensed galaxy (the "source") and the foreground lens (the "deflector").
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MAVIS team outside
30
May

MAVIS gets busy!

The Australian-led international consortium building the MAVIS (Multi-conjugate adaptive optics Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph) instrument for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) gathered together recently for a project ‘Busy Week’ - five days of intensive activity and interaction to progress on key aspects of the project.
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Contributors

Michael Murphy is the Australian representative on the ESO Science Technical Committee. Contact: mmurphy@swin.edu.au

Sarah Sweet is the Australian representative on the ESO Users Committee. Contact: s.sweet@uq.edu.au

Stuart Ryder is a Program Manager with AAL. Contact: Stuart.Ryder@astronomyaustralia.org.au

Guest posts are also welcome – please submit these to eso-forum@astronomyaustralia.org.au