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.

Astronomers using the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile have conducted the deepest spectroscopic survey ever. They focused on the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, measuring distances and properties of 1600 very faint galaxies including 72 galaxies that have never been detected before, even by Hubble itself. This wealth of new information is giving astronomers insight into star formation in the early Universe, and allows them to study the motions and other properties of early galaxies — made possible by MUSE’s unique spectroscopic capabilities.

Your home and the Universe have at least one thing in common: they can be very dusty places! When you get back after a very long vacation, it may happen that the windows in your home are so full of dust that you can’t see through them anymore. Surprisingly, astronomers have a similar problem!

For the first time ever astronomers have studied an asteroid that has entered the Solar System from interstellar space. Observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and other observatories around the world show that this unique object was travelling through space for millions of years before its chance encounter with our star system. It appears to be a dark, reddish, highly-elongated rocky or high-metal-content object.

A temperate planet has been discovered only 11 light-years from Earth by a team using ESO’s unique planet-hunting HARPS instrument. The new world has the designation Ross 128 b and is now the second-closest temperate planet to be detected after Proxima b.

The ALMA Observatory in Chile has detected dust around the closest star to the Solar System, Proxima Centauri. These new observations reveal the glow coming from cold dust in a region between one to four times as far from Proxima Centauri as the Earth is from the Sun.

How can astrophysicists study the story of the Universe? Billions of years ago, when the Big Bang happened, there was no Milky Way Galaxy, no Solar System, no planet Earth and, especially, no human beings to witness these and all the events that followed. So, how would they know about this stuff?

The VLT Survey Telescope has captured the most detailed image yet of the galaxy NGC 1316 and its rich surroundings. Discover more in this episode of ESOcast Light.

Astronomers using a fleet of ESO telescopes have observed a visible counterpart to gravitational waves for the first time: a kilonova from merging neutron stars.

What are you made of? You’re made of matter, which is made of molecules, which are made of atoms. But where did those atoms come from? The ones in you! How were they formed? Well, they were created inside of stars! Really, you’re made of star stuff!