VLT Archives

Close-up of the star RIK 113, seen here surrounded by a cloud of gas and dust called a protoplanetary disc. These discs are a common feature around young stars, containing all the building blocks needed to make a new planet. Over time, these dusty discs will fragment and condense under the influence of gravity, forming larger objects like protoplanets. These planetary embryos carve out gaps in the dust around them, forming the intricate, ring-like structures that we can see in this disc. -- ESO

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

RIK 113: The Likely Site Of A New Planet Forming

by Keith CowingJune 10, 2025June 10, 2025

An international team of astronomers led by University of Galway, has discovered the likely site of a new planet in formation, most likely a gas giant planet up to a […]

Top: an example of a chop-subtraction image pair from VLT/NEAR. Image B, following 0.05 sec after A, is subtracted to remove the detector bias, thermal background, AGPM glow, and excess low frequency noise (ELFN). Bottom: an example model of a chop-subtraction persistence residual (CSPR) of α Centauri AB. This model was generated with an offset of ∼2% of a pixel, or ∼1 mas, of the star’s position behind the coronagraph following each chop. The effects of the coronagraph, persistence non-linearity and temporal decay, and post-processing are not included in the model. The CSPR is too faint to be seen in the frames above, but is easily seen in longer integrations (see Fig. 2). -- astro-ph.IM

Alpha Centauri, Astronomy & Telescopes, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

Imaging Low-mass Planets Within The Habitable Zones Of Nearby Stars With Ground-based Mid-infrared Imaging

by Keith CowingMay 26, 2025May 26, 2025

Giant exoplanets on 10-100 au orbits have been directly imaged around young stars. The peak of the thermal emission from these warm young planets is in the near-infrared (~1-5 microns), […]

Workflow of the proposed method: it exploits both the spectral behavior of speckles and the apparent motion of exoplanets to disentangle the exoplanet signal from the nuisance component in the observations y. To achieve this, local patches of the nuisance are modeled as Gaussian distributions, leveraging problem symmetries and incorporating multiple scales. These patches are fed to our convolutional statistical model, and combined to form a detection map. Additionally, a learned object prior, represented by a UNet fν, is introduced to denoise this detection map produced by the statistical model. This approach results in an end-to-end learnable architecture. -- astro-ph.IM

AI - Data - Apps - Cybernetics, Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Status Report

A New Statistical Model of Star Speckles for Learning to Detect and Characterize Exoplanets in Direct Imaging Observations

by Keith CowingMarch 25, 2025March 25, 2025

The search for exoplanets is an active field in astronomy, with direct imaging as one of the most challenging methods due to faint exoplanet signals buried within stronger residual starlight.

Tylos (or WASP-121b) is a gaseous, giant exoplanet located some 900 light-years away in the constellation Puppis. Using the ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), scientists have been able to prove into its atmosphere, revealing its 3D structure. This is the first time that this has been possible on a planet outside of the Solar System. The atmosphere of Tylos is divided into three layers, with iron winds at the bottom, followed by a very fast jet stream of sodium, and finally an upper layer of hydrogen winds. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet. Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser

Astronomy & Telescopes, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Biogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

First 3D Observations Of An Exoplanet’s Atmosphere Reveal A Unique Climate

by Keith CowingFebruary 18, 2025February 18, 2025

Astronomers have peered through the atmosphere of a planet beyond the Solar System, mapping its 3D structure for the first time. By combining all four telescope units of the European […]

This artist’s visualisation of WASP-127b, a giant gas planet located about 520 light-years from Earth -- ESO

Astronomy & Telescopes, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Gas Giants, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

Extreme Supersonic Winds Measured On Exoplanet WASP-127b

by Keith CowingJanuary 21, 2025January 21, 2025

Astronomers have discovered extremely powerful winds pummeling the equator of WASP-127b, a giant exoplanet. Reaching speeds up to 33 000 km/h, the winds make up the fastest jetstream of its […]

This artist’s impression shows Barnard b, a sub-Earth-mass planet that was discovered orbiting Barnard’s star. Its signal was detected with the ESPRESSO instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), and astronomers were able to confirm it with data from other instruments. An earlier promising detection in 2018 around the same star could not be confirmed by these data. On this newly discovered exoplanet, which has at least half the mass of Venus but is too hot to support liquid water, a year lasts just over three Earth days.Credit:ESO/M. Kornmesser

Astronomy & Telescopes, Barnard's Star, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

A Sub-Earth Mass Planet Has Been Discovered Orbiting Barnard’s Star

by Keith CowingOctober 1, 2024October 1, 2024

Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), astronomers have discovered an exoplanet orbiting Barnard’s star, the closest single star to our Sun. On this newly discovered exoplanet, […]

XAO+PIAAN simulation scheme. -- astro-ph.IM

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Habitable Zones, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Proxima Centauri, Status Report

RISTRETTO: A VLT XAO Design To Reach Proxima Cen b In The Visible

by Keith CowingSeptember 13, 2024September 13, 2024

RISTRETTO is the evolution of the original idea of coupling the VLT instruments SPHERE and ESPRESSO lovis_2016a, aiming at High Dispersion Coronagraphy. RISTRETTO is a visitor instrument that should enable […]

Artist’s impression of the hotspot in WASP-76 b (Credit: Tania Cunha (Planetário do Porto - Centro Ciência Viva)/Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço)

Astrogeology, Astronomy & Telescopes, Atmospheres, Climate, Weather, Biogeochemical Cycles & Geobiology, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço Paves The Way In The Field Of Exoclimatology

by Keith CowingSeptember 6, 2024September 6, 2024

Three papers about “hot jupiter” WASP-76 b, led by Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço researchers, will be the foundation for understanding the global climate of a giant exoplanet.

TESS target pixel files for TOI-260 for sector 3 (left), and for TOI-286 for sector 1 ( right). The remaining sectors are shown in Appendix A. The target star is labelled as 1 and marked by a white cross in each case. All sources from the Gaia DR3 catalogue down to a magnitude contrast of 8 are shown as red circles, with the size proportional to the contrast. The SPOC pipeline aperture is overplotted in shaded red squares. -- astro-ph.EP

Habitable Zones, Status Report, Water/Hycean Worlds & Oceanography

Three Super-Earths And A Possible Water World From TESS And ESPRESSO

by Keith CowingJune 12, 2024June 12, 2024

Since 2018, the ESPRESSO spectrograph at the VLT has been hunting for planets in the Southern skies via the RV method. One of its goals is to follow up candidate […]

This research brings together observations of more than 80 young stars that might have planets forming around them in spectacular discs. This small selection from the survey shows 10 discs from the three regions of our galaxy observed in the papers. V351 Ori and V1012 Ori are located in the most distant of the three regions, the gas-rich cloud of Orion, some 1600 light-years from Earth. DG Tau, T Tau, HP Tau, MWC758 and GM Aur are located in the Taurus region, while HD 97048, WW Cha and SZ Cha can be found in Chamaeleon I, all of which are about 600 light-years from Earth. The images shown here were captured using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). SPHERE’s state-of-the-art extreme adaptive optics system corrects for the turbulent effects of Earth’s atmosphere, yielding crisp images of the discs around stars. The stars themselves have been covered with a coronagraph — a circular mask that blocks their intense glare, revealing the faint discs around them. The discs have been scaled to appear roughly the same size in this composition. Credit: ESO/C. Ginski, A. Garufi, P.-G. Valegård et al.

Astronomy & Telescopes, Exoplanets, -moons, -comets, Imaging & Spectroscopy, Press Release

Groundbreaking Survey Reveals Secrets Of Planet Birth Around Dozens Of StarsESOGroundbreaking Survey Reveals Secrets Of Planet Birth Around Dozens Of Stars

by Keith CowingMarch 5, 2024March 5, 2024

In a series of studies, a team of astronomers has shed new light on the fascinating and complex process of planet formation. The stunning images, captured using the European Southern […]