A €9M contract was announced last week for UK-based engineers and designers to build MOONS (Multi-Object Optical and Near-infrared Spectrograph) that aims to tackle some of the most compelling astronomical puzzles – such as how stars and galaxies form and evo
Observations at many sites in South America, including ESO’s La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the
A new exoplanet, closest and lightest known yet, is discovered in Alpha Centauri system by a team using ESO’s (European Southern Observatory) HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) instrument. It is notable that same team had discovered the first
This timelapse video shows the sky spinning over the Very Large Telescope observatory in Chile, one of the finest observatories in one of the darkest sites on the planet. Set the resolution to 720p to see it properly unpixelated. At 1:10 into the video, you see…
The star-forming regions of a nearby spiral galaxy glow bright pink in a spectacular new image from a telescope atop a Chilean peak. And the galaxy's actually slightly closer than astronomers once thought, researchers say. The glowing pink clouds seen in the…
Mapping the Earth’s magnetic field – to find oil, track storms or probe the planet’s interior – typically requires expensive satellites. University of California, Berkeley, physicists have now come up with a much cheaper way to measure the Earth’s magnetic field
