Not just the title of an excellent Futurama episode, but now a real place. A planet has been found orbiting in a triple star system, a surprising find that may be more common than once thought. Astronomers from the University of Arizona used the European Southern Observatory (ESO)’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to directly image the new planet as it orbits the brightest star in a triple system 320 light years away, in the constellation Centaurus. Orbits like this are thought to be extremely unstable due to the varying gravitational field in the system. “HD 131399Ab is one of the few exoplanets that...
A newly installed instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) has just taken it’s first images, what we call ‘first light’ in the astronomy world. The instrument, called GRAVITY, uses four different 8m telescopes to perform what we call ‘Baseline Interferometry.’ It is expected that tis is the instrument that will allow humanity to take the first ever direct picture of a black hole. Interferometry is a technique that uses multiple small telescopes all collecting light at a specific wavelength. These telescopes form a line that we call the baseline. The combination of these telescopes and...
How do stars lose mass? For a star like the Sun, it shoots out a swath of charged particles into space and sheds mass at a rate of 4 million tons per second! Though even at this rate, the Sun only loses 1% of its total mass every 160 Billion years, so it’s not disappearing anytime soon. For more massive stars, the process can become complex and strange. The red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars, is about 40 times as massive as the Sun, but humungous in scale. If this star were to replace the...
When we have the best telescopes at our disposal, we can take the most detailed data, and ultimately gain the most valuable science. Being able to take a closer look, to resolve the finer details, to see what lies within, gives us the ability to understand the present, peer into the past, and ultimately, predict the future. The ESO’s Very Large Telescope continuously brings in fantastic images of objects that we have studied previously, but weren’t quite sure about. This week we saw another prime example of this. The Medusa Nebula is a planetary nebula in the constellation Gemini. It...
It sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. The incredible and rare dark star cluster, hiding the evil super villain’s headquarters. A dark star cluster is something I would imagine as a spooky, eerie type of place where everything you see changes when you enter its space. Science fiction aside, a dark star cluster is real, and it’s a new type of cluster that is similar to the mighty dense globular clusters that orbit most galaxies. Globular clusters orbit in a halo of space around the centres of galaxies, and though our Milky Way harbours 150 of them,...
The best ever image of a Cometary Globule has been released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) from the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama desert in Chile. It looks a lot like a nebula right? In actuality a cometary globule is a very specific type of nebula. It’s very faint, and it’s formation is a matter of debate among the astronomical community. A cometary globule is small, containing the mass of a few suns worth of material. Compare this to a typical nebula, which has enough material to form thousands or even hundreds of thousands of stars. The...
Quasars are Galaxies with incredibly massive Black Holes at their centre. These Black Holes are fuelled by a swirling disc of material that can be ejected in a long jet along their axis of rotation, all due to the conservation of angular momentum. This accretion disc can be so hot that it causes the central region of the Galaxy to shine more brightly than the entire Galaxy of stars surrounding it. A Belgian team using the Very Large Telescope (VLT) studied a population of 93 Quasars spread over Billions of Light-Years, and noticed that the rotation axes of the Quasars...
