Geheimnisvolles Universum - Europas Astronomen entschleiern das Weltall

Dirk H. Lorenzen

Reviewed by H.W. Duerbeck

Published by Franck-Kosmos GmbH \& Co., Stuttgart 2002 ISBN 3-440-09246-1, Price:
49.90 EUR (D) (208 p, 155 color and 33 b&w photos)

File jad8_4.ps contains the complete review in postscript format.

The 25th birthday of ESO, in 1987, was celebrated by the publication of an

illustrated popular book, Exploring the Southern Sky (Springer-Verlag 1987), which
also saw editions in Danish, English, French, German, and Spanish. Written and
illustrated by the ESO staff members Svend Laustsen, Claus Madsen and Richard M.
West, its many pictures were mainly taken with the ESO 3.6m and Schmidt telescopes.
The structure of the book - perhaps at that time somewhat unusual - started with
things far away (Universe and galaxies), zoomed in to the Milky Way, and finally
reached the Solar System (with a concluding chapter dealing with the La Silla
observatory).

Now, with the 4 units of the Very Large Telescope in full operation, and on the
occasion of ESO's 40th birthday, another "jubilee'' book has appeared:
Geheimnisvolles Universum: Europas Astronomen entschleiern das Weltall, written by
the science journalist Dirk H. Lorenzen, of Hamburg, Germany, and prefaced by
Cathérine Césarsky, Director General of ESO. Presumably, this book will also soon
become available in more languages spoken in ESO member countries. Thus it may be
worthwhile to review the first edition, although some readers may like to wait for
more easily accessible editions.

Before going into details, let me first mention that I find this a very
impressing book, great to look at and refreshing to read. With ESO seen through the
eyes of a visitor, things gain a perspective that is quite different from that of
the previous book, and at least as attractive. It comes as no surprise that the
book starts with a visit of ESO's showcase, the Paranal Observatory, and the writer
not only notes down his own impressions, but also cites statements of some of the
many people that keep Paranal going - technicians and staff astronomers. This
mixture of texts provides a good impression of the operations at a large
observatory for the general reader.

The two more `astronomical' parts that follow deal with star and planet formation,
stellar death and dust formation, as well as with the Universe, its beginnings and
contents (focussing on quasars and SN Ia); like the previous chapters, they contain
many quotations of astronomers involved in these types of research (I suppose they
are taken from interviews); these blocks, each composed of three chapters, are
separated by a more technical part, two chapters dealing with interferometry and
adaptive optics.

The last third of the book is then dedicated almost exclusively to ESO's
"prehistory'', and here the reviewer starts to frown. This is a very extensive
report on Jürgen Stock's early site testing work for US astronomers, first for
Gerard Kuiper and the University of Texas, and then for the Association of
Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), to find an suitable place for a
projected telescope and then for the AURA southern observatory, with page-long
excerpts from his notebooks (or the printed "Stock reports''). It also deals with
Stock's later activities in Chile and Venezuela. Finally, there are a few pages on
the foundation of ESO and the choice of a Chilean site, as well as another few
pages on future projects of ESO.
The decision of ESO to go to Chile is treated very briefly, much shorter than in
Blaauw's 1991 book ESO's Early History; the reasons for the early focussing on a
site in South Africa, and the relatively quick jump on the "Chilean bandwagon''
remain quite obscure. Compared to that, the 25 pages of "Stock reports'' written to
help the decision making of the site of the AURA observatory, contain a lot of not-
too-relevant details like prices and names of horses and mules employed in Stock's
site testing survey. It is fun reading, but does not penetrate under the surface,
and the author's somewhat desperate attempt to join together the ends of the
threat, "also the VLT is a consequence of Jürgen Stock's activities in Chile'',
appears not very convincing.

I do not want at all to diminish Stock's immense work that made Chile to the
"golden land of astronomy'' in the late decades of the 20th century. Stock was sent
by the US astronomers, and they became active because of Kuiper's enthusiasm, that
was triggered by a visit of Federico Rutlland, director of the Astronomy Department
of the Universidad de Chile -- the former Chilean National Observatory, whose
founding was triggered by the activities of a US astronomical expedition in the
mid-19th century, headed by James Gilliss; and Gilliss was inspired by an
astronomical proposition made in 1847 by Christian Gerling, a mathematics professor
of Marburg. And besides this line of events, there have been other astronomical
expeditions and observing stations in the north of Chile in the late 19th and early
20th century. What is the true first cause of the presently florishing astronomical
activity in Chile? Certainly not the "Stock report''! At times ESO's development
resembled more a random walk than a strategic process, that - given enough time and
money - finally culminated in a very successful research institution.

This very pretty and informative book, whose author - intentionally or

unintentionally - had the courage to neglect important things, and to include
irrelevant things, is not a book that tells the whole story (and actually no book
can achieve this goal!). Even a book like Lorenzen's that is composed of huge
fragments that do not quite fit into the story, can make fascinating reading.
However, besides the publisher's logo, this book carries the ESO logo, and
therefore becomes something like an "official'' ESO publication. And this is why
one wonders why so much space is used up to describe activities which have hardly
any relation to ESO's history, a history that really deserves to be communicated to
the interested general public. If this book would encourage some of the early
players of ESO to pen down their memoirs and make them available to science writers
and historians, a story at least as colorful as that of Jürgen Stock would emerge!
And only then it would be possible to write a more balanced history of ESO.ariable
on long time scales, typically months and longer. Since the atmospheric velocities
and particularly velocity variations are small (a few km/s only) for spectroscopic
studies of these stars high spectral resolution is needed. Since traditionally
high-dispersion spectrographs have been attached to large telescopes only, where
typical observing runs are shorter than a week, the long time-scale variations of
these stars are little studied with high dispersion and good coverage in time and
wide spectral range. Only photographic data (with their well-known problems) are
available over longer time scales for a few stars, e.g. P Cygni.