Press Releases
July 2010
28 July 2010 - ESO
Brilliant Star in a Colourful Neighbourhood
A spectacular new image from ESO’s Wide Field Imager at the La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the brilliant and unusual star WR 22 and its colourful surroundings. WR 22 is a very hot and bright star that is shedding its atmosphere into space at a rate many millions of times faster than the Sun. It lies in the outer part of the dramatic Carina Nebula from which it formed.
26 July 2010 - CERN
ICHEP 2010 conference highlights first results from the LHC
First results from the LHC at CERN are being revealed at ICHEP, the world’s largest international conference on particle physics, which has attracted more than 1000 participants to its venue in Paris.
21 July 2010 - ESO
Stars Just Got Bigger
Using a combination of instruments on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered the most massive stars to date, one weighing at birth more than 300 times the mass of the Sun, or twice as much as the currently accepted limit of 150 solar masses. The existence of these monsters - millions of times more luminous than the Sun, losing weight through very powerful winds - may provide an answer to the question “how massive can stars be?”
15 July 2010 - ESRF
New light on Leonardo Da Vinci’s faces
How did Leonardo Da Vinci manage to paint such perfect faces? For the first time a quantitative chemical analysis has been done on seven paintings from the Louvre Museum (including the Mona Lisa) without extracting any samples.
14 July 2010 - ESO
Unravelling the Mystery of Massive Star Birth
Astronomers have obtained the first image of a dusty disc closely encircling a massive baby star, providing direct evidence that massive stars form in the same way as their smaller brethren. This discovery, made thanks to a combination of ESO’s telescopes, is described in an article in this week’s issue of Nature.
7 July 2010 - ESO
Black Hole Blows Big Bubble
Combining observations made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope, astronomers have uncovered the most powerful pair of jets ever seen from a stellar black hole. This object, also known as a microquasar, blows a huge bubble of hot gas, 1000 light-years across, twice as large and tens of times more powerful than other known microquasars. The discovery is reported this week in the journal Nature.
4 July 2010 - EMBL
Digital Embryo gains wing
Scientists at EMBL Heidelberg were able to capture fruit fly development on film, creating the Fly Digital Embryo. In work published today in Nature Methods, they were also the first to clearly record how a zebrafish’s eyes and midbrain are formed.