Annual Report 2016
European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere
ESO
Annual Report 2016
ESO
European Organisationfor AstronomicalResearch in theSouthern Hemisphere
Presented to the Council by the Director General Tim de Zeeuw
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ESO Annual Report 2016
Pacic coast in one of the driest areas in the world. Scientic operations began in
1999 and have resulted in many extreme-ly successful research programmes. The VLT is a most unusual telescope and arguably the world’s most advanced optical instrument. It is not just one tele-scope, but an array of four, each with a main mirror 8.2 metres in diameter. With one such telescope, images of celestial objects as faint as magnitude 30 have been obtained in a one-hour exposure. This corresponds to seeing objects that are four billion times fainter than those seen with the naked eye.One of the most exciting features of the VLT is the option to use it as a giant opti-cal interferometer (the VLT Interferometer or VLTI). This is done by combining the ESO, the European Southern Observa tory, is the foremost intergovernmental astron-omy organisation in Europe. It is sup-ported by 16 countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil
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, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Several other countries have expressed an interest in membership.Created in 1962, ESO carries out an ambitious programme focused on the design, construction and operation of powerful ground-based observing facilities enabling astronomers to make
important scientic discoveries. ESO
also plays a leading role in promoting and organising cooperation in astro-nomical research.ESO operates three world-class observ-ing sites in the Atacama Desert region
of Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. La Silla, located 2400 metres above sea
level and 600 kilometres north of Santiago
de Chile, was ESO’s rst site. It is
equipped with several optical telescopes with mirror diameters of up to 3.6 metres. The 3.5-metre New Technology Tele-scope (NTT) broke new ground in the
1980s and was the rst in the world
to have a computer-controlled main mir-ror, a technology developed at ESO and now applied to most of the world’s cur-
rent large telescopes. La Silla remains
at the forefront of astronomy, and is the
second most scientically productive
observatory in ground-based astronomy (after Paranal). The Paranal site is located 2600 metres above sea level and is home to the Very Large Telescope (VLT), the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA), the world’s largest survey telescope, and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the largest telescope designed exclusively to survey the skies in visible light. Paranal is situated about 130 kilometres south of Antofagasta in Chile, 12 kilometres inland from the
The European Southern Observatory
The four Unit Telescopes (UTs) of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile.
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Brazil has already signed an Accession Agreement
and will ofcially become the 16th Member State of ESO on completion of the requisite ratication
process.
S . O t a r o l a / E S O P . H o r á l e k / E S O
The telescopes of the ALMA array spread across the
Chajnantor plateau in Chile. APEX can be seen in the distance (far right).
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