Press Releases
April 2010
26 April 2010 - ESO
E-ELT Site Chosen
On 26 April 2010, the ESO Council selected Cerro Armazones as the baseline site for the planned 42-metre European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT). Cerro Armazones is a mountain at an altitude of 3060 metres in the central part of Chile's Atacama Desert, some 130 kilometres south of the town of Antofagasta and about 20 kilometres from Cerro Paranal, home of ESO’s Very Large Telescope.
21 April 2010 - ESRF
Experimental explanation of supercooling : why water does not freeze in the clouds
Supercooling, a state where liquids do not solidify even below their normal freezing point, still puzzles scientists today. Scientists from the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives (CEA), the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the ESRF have found an experimental explanation of the phenomenon of supercooling.
21 April 2010 - ESO
VISTA Captures Celestial Cat’s Hidden Secrets
The Cat’s Paw Nebula, NGC 6334, is a huge stellar nursery, the birthplace of hundreds of massive stars. In a magnificent new ESO image taken with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile, the glowing gas and dust clouds obscuring the view are penetrated by infrared light and some of the Cat’s hidden young stars are revealed.
13 April 2010 - ESO
Turning Planetary Theory Upside Down
The discovery of nine new transiting exoplanets is announced today at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM2010). When these new results were combined with earlier observations of transiting exoplanets astronomers were surprised to find that six out of a larger sample of 27 were found to be orbiting in the opposite direction to the rotation of their host star — the exact reverse of what is seen in our own Solar System. The new discoveries provide an unexpected and serious challenge to current theories of planet formation. They also suggest that systems with exoplanets of the type known as hot Jupiters are unlikely to contain Earth-like planets.
12 April 2010 - ESRF
First studies of fossil of new human ancestor take place at the ESRF
Despite its recent discovery, one of the best-preserved hominid fossils has already been analysed with synchrotron light.
8 April 2010 EMBL
Variations on the genetic theme
Integrating data from an unprecedented variety of human tissue samples, scientists at EMBL-EBI and their collaborators have produced the first-ever global map of gene expression, published today in Nature Biotechnology.
7 April 2010 - ESO
Triton’s Summer Sky of Methane and Carbon Monoxide
According to the first ever infrared analysis of the atmosphere of Neptune's moon Triton, summer is in full swing in its southern hemisphere. The European observing team used ESO's Very Large Telescope and discovered carbon monoxide and made the first ground-based detection of methane in Triton's thin atmosphere. These observations revealed that the thin atmosphere varies seasonally, thickening when warmed.