Tag: VLT
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Artificial Stars Illuminate the Tarantula Nebula: VLT’s GRAVITY+ Upgrade
Unveiling a Cosmic Target: The Tarantula Nebula The Tarantula Nebula, a sprawling star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is one of the most dynamic laboratories for studying how massive stars are born and evolve. Recently, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) have turned to an inventive technique: guiding light to create artificial stars…
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Tarantula Nebula: Artificial Stars via VLT GRAVITY+
Overview: Lasers and the Tarantula Nebula In a remarkable display of modern astronomy, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has employed its powerful interferometer, the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), in conjunction with the GRAVITY+ upgrade. The goal: generate artificial stars with laser-tired precision to probe the Tarantula Nebula, one of the most…
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Artificial Stars by Lasers: Tarantula Nebula and the VLT’s GRAVITY+ Breakthrough (Photo of the Day, Nov. 19, 2025)
Overview: Lasers, Interferometry, and the Tarantula Nebula On November 19, 2025, astronomers highlighted a striking demonstration of optical interferometry: lasers used to create artificial stars as part of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and its interferometric upgrade, the VLTI GRAVITY+ system. The Tarantula Nebula, a luminous star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, serves as…
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Unveiling J0529: How Blazing Outflows Shrinked the Universe’s Brightest Quasar Mass by 10x
Revisiting a Cosmic heavyweight J0529 stands as the Universe’s brightest known quasar, a blazing beacon powered by a supermassive black hole that formed not long after the Big Bang. In 2024, estimates pegged its mass at about 10 billion solar masses, a figure that underscored how rapidly supermassive black holes could grow in the early…
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New GRAVITY+ Reveal Shrinks Brightest Quasar Mass by Order of Magnitude
New measurements by GRAVITY+ challenge long-held estimates of the Universe’s brightest quasar Peering back to the early universe often requires scientists to rely on indirect methods and assumptions. A recent study, however, leveraged the GRAVITY+ instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO VLT) to map the Broad Line Region (BLR) of…
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Polishing a Telescope Mirror: A Closer Look at the VLT’s Precision Craft
Overview: The Art of Keeping a 25-Ton Mirror Perfect Night after night in the dry air of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) relies on its meticulously polished aluminum mirrors to capture some of the most detailed views of the cosmos. The process of maintaining these 25-ton mirrors is…
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Polishing a VLT Mirror: Precision in the Atacama Desert
Behind the Science: Why Mirror Polishing Matters In the dry, pristine skies of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) stares into the cosmos with unmatched clarity. The secret isn’t just advanced software or massive detectors; it begins with a single, exquisitely thin layer of metal: the aluminum coating on the…
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Polishing a telescope mirror: VLT at Cerro Paranal desert
What makes a telescope mirror so critical—and so finicky? In the world of high-precision astronomy, the surface of a telescope mirror is everything. The 25-ton (23 metric tons) primary mirrors of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) are engineered to gather faint starlight and reflect it into sensitive detectors with extraordinary accuracy. Yet just like any…
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Rogue Planet Growth: Explosive Accretion in Space
The extraordinary finding A free-floating, or rogue, planet named Cha 1107-7626 is undergoing an immense growth spurt, pulling in gas and dust from its surrounding disk at roughly six billion metric tons per second. Scientists say this is the highest accretion rate ever measured for a planetary-mass object. The discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal…
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Rogue Planet Accretion Surges Explosively in Space
An international team of astronomers has documented an explosive growth phase in a rogue planet, Cha 1107-7626, a world that wanders interstellar space, unbound to any star. The object is accumulating gas and dust from a surrounding disk at a rate of six billion tonnes per second, the highest accretion rate ever recorded for an…