Starship Asterisk*

Credits: ESA/Hubble & NASA, J. Lee and the PHANGS-HST Team

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The spiral pattern shown by the galaxy in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is striking because of its delicate, feathery nature. These "flocculent" spiral arms indicate that the recent history of star formation of the galaxy, known as NGC 2775, has been relatively quiet. There is virtually no star formation in the central part of the galaxy, which is dominated by an unusually large and relatively empty galactic bulge, where all the gas was converted into stars long ago.

NGC 2275 is classified as a flocculent spiral galaxy, located 67 million light-years away in the constellation of Cancer.

Millions of bright, young, blue stars shine in the complex, feather-like spiral arms, interlaced with dark lanes of dust. Complexes of these hot, blue stars are thought to trigger star formation in nearby gas clouds. The overall feather-like spiral patterns of the arms are then formed by shearing of the gas clouds as the galaxy rotates. The spiral nature of flocculents stands in contrast to the grand design spirals, which have prominent, well defined-spiral arms.

Image Credit: ESO / Mahdi Zamani

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On 2 July 2019, ESO’s La Silla Observatory was host to a rare astronomical event, a total solar eclipse. Inaugurated in 1969, La Silla Observatory led ESO to the front line of astronomical science. The 50th anniversary last year celebrated La Silla’s continued contribution to science, and coincided fortuitously with the shadow of the total solar eclipse, or umbra, passing over the site.

Captured in this image is the stunning view of the total solar eclipse, a rare event which lasted for less than two minutes that day. During a total solar eclipse, the Sun and Moon cross paths in the sky, overlapping perfectly, a feat only possible because the Sun and Moon happen to be the right distance from the Earth to take up the same portion of the sky.

A few stars shine bright for a moment while the Sun’s brilliant corona halos the Moon, like shimmering strands of silk. A truly breathtaking experience, one that will not occur again at La Silla until the year 2231.

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This image from a simulation shows how the the large, red supergiant star Betelgeuse may have been created by the tidal disruption and merger of a binary star within the past few hundred thousand years. Betelgeuse — a prominent star in our night sky — has recently made headlines due to its unexpected, sudden dimming and rebrightening. But the supergiant has other quirks, like how it’s hurtling rapidly through space as a “runaway” star, or how it spins unusually fast for its size. A team of Louisiana State University researchers led by Manos Chatzopoulos has now performed simulations that show that Betelgeuse’s odd properties could be explained if the supergiant was formed by the merger of an unequal-mass binary star system in the relatively recent past. To learn more about the authors’ results, check out the original article.

• Astrophysical Journal 896(1):50 (2020 Jun 10) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab91bb
• arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:2005.04172 > 08 May 2020

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. de Jong Acknowledgement: Judy Schmidt (geckzilla)

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The galaxy known as NGC 5907 stretches wide across this image. Appearing as an elongated line of stars and dark dust, the galaxy is categorised as a spiral galaxy just like our own Milky Way. In this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, we don’t see the beautiful spiral arms because we are viewing it edge-on, like looking at the rim of a plate. It is for this reason that NGC 5907 is also known as the Knife Edge Galaxy.

The Knife Edge Galaxy is about 50 million light-years from Earth, lying in the northern constellation of Draco. Although not visible in this image, ghostly streams of stars on large arching loops extend into space, circling around the galaxy; they are believed to be remnants of a small dwarf galaxy, torn apart by the Knife Edge Galaxy and merged with it over four billion years ago.

Image Credit: ESO/Petr Horálek

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The onset of early morning reveals the ESO Residencia hotel, where astronomers and engineers stay while working with the ESO telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert. These telescopes include the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) — which are visible in the background — and VISTA (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy).

Because of the arid desert that surrounds it, the Residencia is sometimes called an “oasis in the desert”. The scenery is so striking that the building was featured in the 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace. The views from the western side of the Residencia towards the Pacific Ocean are spectacular, and the architecture itself is also award-winning.

Guests staying at the Residencia are well provided for, with over a hundred bedrooms, a restaurant, a swimming pool and even a sauna available. There is also an artificial garden that acts as a refuge from some of the harshest weather conditions on Earth, including extreme dryness, high winds, intense sunlight and large temperature fluctuations.

ESO’s latest and most ambitious project, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), is being built nearby at Cerro Armazones and the Residencia will also serve the scientists and engineers working there.