On 2 July 2019, a total solar eclipse occurred over ESO’s La Silla Observatory in the Chilean Atacama Desert. ESO invited nearly 25 scientists, communicators and educators to observe and document this rare occasion from La Silla.

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) captured an unprecedented image of two circumstellar disks, in which baby stars are growing, feeding with material from their surrounding birth disk. These observations shed new light on the earliest phases of the lives of stars and help astronomers determine the conditions in which binary stars are born.

In November 2018 the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope pinpointed a fast radio burst, named FRB 181112. Follow-up observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other telescopes revealed that the radio pulses have passed through the halo of a massive galaxy on their way toward Earth. This finding allowed astronomers to analyse the radio signal for clues about the nature of the halo gas.

ESO’s VISTA telescope has been surveying our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud for about a decade. The observations revealed in unprecedented detail the properties of 10 million stars in the galaxy. As a result, astronomers have got new opportunities to study stellar evolution, galactic dynamics, and variable stars.