In a groundbreaking discovery, astronomers have spotted at least 70 -- but potentially up to 170 -- new "rogue" planets floating by themselves in space thanks to wide-field images gathered from satellites and other facilities across the globe.
The European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) has captured a photo of a planet orbiting b Centauri, which challenges many previous theories regarding massive stars and their ability to host planets.
The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO VLT) has captured a world's first: the first ever image of two giant exoplanets orbiting a young 'Sun-like' star 300 light years away from our own. The photograph could provide important information about the formation of our own solar system.
In 2019, researchers made international headlines by releasing the world's first photo of a black hole. Here's a 1-minute video that zooms from the night sky into that black hole image to show how impressive the achievement was.
Scientists just further confirmed what has long been believed: that there's a supermassive black hole scientists named Sagittarius A* at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. This mind-blowing 1.5-minute video zooms in from a wide view of the night sky into the tiny little area where the latest telescopic observations were just made.
Behold: this is the first confirmed image of a planet being born. The image was captured by SPHERE, a planet-hunting instrument on the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope.
Astronomers using the ESO Very Large Telescope have created the most detailed photo ever of a star other than our own Sun. The subject of the photo is the supergiant Antares, visible to the unaided eye in the constellation Scorpius.
Astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile have released a breathtaking new photograph showing the central area of our Milky Way galaxy. The photograph shows a whopping 84 million stars in an image measuring 108500x81500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels.
Inspired by photographer Richard Silver's time-slice photos that we featured last month, European Southern Observatory Fellow Gabriel Brammer decided to do the same thing, except with photographs of the ESO's Very Large Telescope in northern Chile instead of NYC buildings.
European Southern Observatory photo ambassador Yuri Beletsky shot a series of epic photos showing astronomers shooting powerful laser beams into the night sky. The photo above showing a laser beam pointed at the center of our galaxy was voted as last year's Picture of the Year over at Wikipedia.
Last week we shared the beautiful first space photo to be taken with the OmegaCAM, a 268-megapixel, 1,700-lb camera operated by the European Southern Observatory. Here are some photographs of the camera itself, which uses an array of 32 separate CCD sensors for its incredible resolution.