1/ It’s #ESOUsersDay, and we’d like to congratulate our colleague @cfmanara , astronomer at ESO in Garching, who has been awarded an @ERC_Research Starting Grant! #ERCStG His project will investigate the origin of the rings & asymmetric structures in protoplanetary discs.
@cfmanara@ERC_Research 2/ His project uses VLT instruments like X-Shooter, ESPRESSO, UVES, CRIRES+, SPHERE & MUSE as well as @almaobs The goal is to study the signatures that planets and winds leave on discs, pushing current studies to distant and massive star-forming regions and preparing for the ELT
@cfmanara@ERC_Research@almaobs 3. Also, next week we restart our Hypatia Colloquium series! On Jan 18 at 15:00 CET, Laura Sommovigo ( @scuolanormale ) will talk about the dust temperature in high-z galaxies, and Leindert Boogaard ( @mpi_astro ) will focus on gold gas at 15:30.
Details: eso.org/sci/meetings/g…
That's of course *cold* gas, don't rush out there to mine for gold gas.
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1/ Did you watch #DontLookUp by @GhostPanther ? Fun fact: when Dr. Mindy is scribbling orbital equations on a whiteboard, that’s actually our own @MichaelMarsset , currently an @ESO fellow in Chile!
@GhostPanther@MichaelMarsset 2/ Michaël is an expert on asteroids, having used our VLT to study their shapes and formation history. In 2020 he was a postdoc at @MIT and when the movie team reached out looking for a "double" for that scene, he didn't think twice.
@GhostPanther@MichaelMarsset@MIT 3/ "I immediately replied that I was interested," he says, "being a huge fan of @LeoDiCaprio both as an actor and as an environmental activist. The central idea of the movie, the imminence of a cometary impact as an allegory of the climate crisis, also strongly resonated with me"
2/ The disc in question, called a circumplanetary disc, surrounds the exoplanet PDS 70c, one of two giant, Jupiter-like planets orbiting a star nearly 400 light-years away.
Credit: @ESO /L. Calçada, ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al.
3/ Astronomers had found hints of a “moon-forming” disc around this exoplanet before but, since they could not clearly tell the disc apart from its surrounding environment, they could not confirm its detection — until now.
1/20 Happy 20th anniversary UT4! Do you know this giant telescope, part of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at @ESO ’s Paranal Observatory? You might recognise it from its cool lasers pointing at the sky. Does this sound like science fiction? We open this thread to tell the story.
2/20 The 4th Unit Telescope of ESO’s VLT is known as UT4 or Yepun, meaning Venus or evening star in Mapudungun, an indigenous language of Chile. It has a main mirror 8.2 metres in diameter and weighs around 430 tonnes.
3/20 It was given its name by Jorssy Albánez following a contest in 1999. Jorssy was a 17-years-old student from northern Chile at the time.
1/4 Observations with ESO’s SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope have revealed the telltale signs of a star system being born.
Credit: @ESO /Boccaletti et al. eso.org/public/news/es…
2/4 The young system, AB Aurigae, lies only 520 light-years away from Earth in the Auriga constellation.
Credit: @ESO /Boccaletti et al. /M. Kornmesser
3/4 Around the young star lies a dense disc of dust and gas where astronomers have spotted a prominent spiral structure with a twist that marks the site where a planet may be forming.
Credit: @ESO /Boccaletti et al.
1/10 All eyes on #Betelgeuse these days. What’s happening to this well-known star in the constellation of #Orion?
2/10 Normally one of the brightest stars in the sky, it’s now fainter than ever before in recorded history.
3/10 Astronomers think the star is preparing to blow, going #supernova. Think cosmic time scales though. This artist’s impression shows #Betelgeuse shedding its material. eso.org/public/images/…
Credit: @ESO /L. Calçada
1/ Michel Mayor & Didier Queloz have been awarded the #NobelPrize2019 in Physics for the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star. eso.org/public/announc…
2/ The discovery of exoplanet #51Pegasib was announced on 6 October 1995 by Mayor and Queloz, who detected it using the ELODIE spectrograph at the Observatoire de Haute-Provence in France.
3/ The discovery revolutionised astronomy, initiating an entirely new field and new instruments focused on finding and characterising exoplanets.