European Southern Observatory
ESOcast 141 Light | ESPRESSO — The Next Generation Planet Hunter
Published 6th December 2017
The Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) successfully made its first observations in November 2017. Installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, ESPRESSO will search for exoplanets with unprecedented precision by looking at the miniscule changes in the properties of light coming from their host stars. For the first time ever, an instrument will be able to sum up the light from all four VLT telescopes and achieve the light collecting power of a 16-metre telescope.
The Echelle Spectrograph for Rocky Exoplanet and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) successfully made its first observations in November 2017. Installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, ESPRESSO will search for exoplanets with unprecedented precision by looking at the minuscule changes in the properties of light coming from their host stars. For the first time ever, an instrument will be able to sum up the light from all four VLT telescopes and achieve the light collecting power of a 16-metre telescope.
&
MUSE's View Of The Hubble Ultra Deep Field
Published 6th December 2017
This video gives a close-up view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field region, a tiny but much-studied region in the constellation of Fornax, as observed with the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. But this rich and colourful picture only gives a very partial view of the power of the MUSE data, which also provide a spectrum for each pixel in the picture. This data set has allowed astronomers not only to measure distances for far more of these galaxies than before — a total of 1600 — but also to find out much more about each of them. Surprisingly 72 new galaxies were found that had eluded deep imaging with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
This video sequence shows the Hubble Ultra Deep Field region and highlights in blue the glowing haloes of gas around many distant galaxies discovered using the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope in Chile. The discovery of so many huge haloes, which radiate ultraviolet Lyman-alpha radiation, around many distant galaxies is one of the many results coming out of this very deep spectroscopic survey.
This sequence starts with an image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field from the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope. The first grey circles that appear mark galaxies that had had their distances well measured before the MUSE survey. The more numerous reddish circles that follow are new measurements from MUSE, about 1600 in total. The final crosses mark the positions of galaxies that were only detected in the MUSE spectroscopic data and which were totally invisible to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The colours of the crosses indicate distance, with green closest and red most distant.