Archive for VLT

Maynooth Astronomy Picture of the Week!

Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on April 17, 2023 by telescoper
“A Stellar Sprinkler”

I think for the first time, Maynooth astronomers have been featured in the European Space Agency’s Picture of the Week. Here is the blurb from ESO:

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This Picture of the Week shows the young stellar object 244-440 in the Orion Nebula observed with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) –– the sharpest image ever taken of this object. That wiggly magenta structure is a jet of matter launched close to the star, but why does it have that shape?

Very young stars are often surrounded by discs of material falling towards the star. Some of this material can be expelled into powerful jets perpendicularly to the disc. The S-shaped jet of 244-440 suggests that what lurks at the center of this object isn’t one but two stars orbiting each other. This orbital motion periodically changes the orientation of the jet, similar to a water sprinkler. Another possibility is that the strong radiation from the other stars in the Orion cloud could be altering the shape of the jet.

These observations, presented in a new paper led by Andrew Kirwan at Maynooth University in Ireland, were taken with the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) instrument at ESO’s VLT in Chile. Red, green and blue colours show the distribution of iron, nitrogen and oxygen respectively. But this is just a small fraction of all the data gathered by MUSE, which actually takes thousands of images at different colours or wavelengths simultaneously. This allows astronomers to study not only the distribution of many different chemical elements but also how they move. 

Moreover, MUSE is installed at the VLT’s Unit Telescope 4, which is equipped with an advanced adaptive optics facility that corrects atmospheric turbulence, delivering images sharper than Hubble’s. These new observations will therefore allow astronomers to study with unprecedented detail how stars are born in massive clouds like Orion.

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There’s also a little video showing how the picture was made using MUSE:

Congratulations to Andrew Hirwan and supervisor Emma Whelan from the Department of Experimental Physics for this coup!

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From Time to Time

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on June 5, 2011 by telescoper

It having been my birthday yesterday, and very nice it was too, thank you for asking, I’m filled this morning with thoughts about the passage of time. It’s strange how working in education imposes a cycle on your life: admissions, teaching, exams, graduation ceremonies, summer recess, and so on. The main thing that breaks this pattern of recurrence is when students finish their finals and leave for the big wide world. Since I moved to Cardiff in 2007, the 4th year students who have just finished their examinations are the first cohort that I’ve seen through their whole degree programme at Cardiff University, and it will be great to see them all get their degrees next month in St David’s Hall, but it will be yet another reminder of the passage of the years.

Not that I’m one to get depressed about such things. I’ve taken surprisingly well to middle age and gracefully (?) surrendered the things of youth some time ago. However, time is such a mysterious thing it’s hard not to think about its passing every now and then.

This time last year I was in Copenhagen for a small cosmology workshop. There’ll be a repeat performance next week too, so I’ll be off to Denmark for a few days. In fact I bought my ticket some time ago, but realised only on Friday that it was next week, and not the week after, so have had to rearrange a few things rather hastily. The advancing years have obviously addled my brain.

Anyway, all this talk about time and cycles gives me some sort of excuse to post the following video from the ESO Very Large Telescope in Chile. The photography is wonderful. Pity about the music, though. Spoils it a bit if you ask me…

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