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    Mysterious Neptune Dark Spot detected from Earth for the first time

    August 28, 2023, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    There are four telescopic images of the planet Neptune side-by-side. The rightmost one is an almost-featureless cyan disc with a faint dark spot to the upper-right. The other three, coloured in blue, green and red, show higher contrast views of dark and bright spots, as well as bands crossing the planet diagonally.

    Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have observed a large dark spot in Neptune’s atmosphere, with an unexpected smaller bright spot adjacent to it. This is the first time a dark spot on the planet has ever been observed with a telescope on Earth. These occasional features in the blue background of Neptune’s atmosphere are a mystery to astronomers, and the new results provide further clues as to their nature and origin.

    Large spots are common features in the atmospheres of giant planets, the most famous being Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. On Neptune, a dark spot was first discovered by NASA’s Voyager 2 in 1989, before disappearing a few years later...

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    Red alert: Massive Stars Sound Warning they are about to go Supernova

    October 17, 2022, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    This artist’s impression shows the supergiant star Betelgeuse as it was revealed thanks to different state-of-the-art techniques on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), which allowed two independent teams of astronomers to obtain the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate. Credit: European Southern Observatory/L. Calçada Licence type Attribution (CC BY 4.0)

    Astronomers from Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Montpellier have devised an ‘early warning’ system to sound the alert when a massive star is about ...

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    Most Distant Quasar with Powerful Radio Jets discovered

    March 9, 2021, Categories  Astronomy/Space

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    With the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered and studied in detail the most distant source of radio emission known to date. The source is a “radio-loud” quasar — a bright object with powerful jets emitting at radio wavelengths — that is so far away its light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The discovery could provide important clues to help astronomers understand the early Universe.

    With the help of the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered and studied in detail the most distant source of radio emission known to date...

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    First ever image of a Multi-planet system around a Sun-like Star captured by ESO telescope

    July 24, 2020, Categories  Astronomy/Space

    The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has taken the first ever image of a young, Sun-like star accompanied by two giant exoplanets. Images of systems with multiple exoplanets are extremely rare, and — until now — astronomers had never directly observed more than one planet orbiting a star similar to the Sun. The observations can help astronomers understand how planets formed and evolved around our own Sun.

    The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has taken the first ever image of a young, Sun-like star accompanied by two giant exoplanets. Images of systems with multiple exoplanets are extremely rare, and – until now – astronomers had never directly observed more than one planet orbiting a star similar to the Sun...

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