Star-filled skies captured in breathtaking detail by new telescope that will shed light on the cosmos


This spectacularly starry landscape is the first breathtaking photo to be captured by a massive new telescope deep in Chile's arid Atacama Desert.

The region is home to some of the clearest skies on Earth and the VLT Survey Telescope (VST) took full advantage of this as it opened its eye to the southern night for the first time.



The picture shows the star-forming region known as Messier 17 - or more commonly the Omega or Swan Nebula - which lies in the Sagittarius constellation. It is a vast region of gas, dust and hot young stars in the heart of the Milky Way.

The star-forming region of Messier 17 has been photographed in incredible detail for the first time thanks to a powerful new telescope with a 268 mega-pixel camera The state-of-the-art 2.6 metre telescop e has a field of view twice as broad as the full moon. It is the largest in the world exclusively surveying the sky in visible light. It is the latest addition to the European Space Organisation's array. It is equipped with a 268 mega-pixel camera called OmegaCAM that is designed to capture even the fainter parts of space and can map the sky quickly and with fine quality.

The telescope will work alongside 'Vista' - an infrared survey telescope - and together they will create some of the best images of space ever seen.

It is housed at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, and is next to another four powerful telescopes.



Tim de Zeeuw, ESO director general, said: 'I am very pleased to see the impressive first images from the VST and OmegaCAM. The unique combination of the VST and the Vista infrared survey telescope will allow many interesting objects to be identified for more detailed follow-up observations with the powerful telescopes of the VLT.'



The second images to be released from the VST has been described by the ESO as 'possibly the best ever portrait of the globular star cluster Omega Centauri.'

It is the largest globular cluster in the sky, but the very wide field of view of VST and OmegaCAM was able to encompass even the faint outer regions of the spectacular object. This splendid view includes about 300,000 stars.

Outer space: This view of Omega Centauri includes around 300,000 stars

UK astronomers are now gearing up to survey the sky in earnest. They will lead two of the VST’s three surveys over the next five years.



Professor Tom Shanks of Durham University will be leading the ATLAS survey which will focus on understanding dark energy.



He said: 'VST ATLAS combined with the VISTA Hemisphere Survey offers a new window on the Southern Sky, reaching from the ultraviolet to the infrared.



'At a step, these Southern Hemisphere surveys will overtake those in the north in terms of depth and wavelength coverage. Their large sky area will make them a powerful base for future cosmological surveys of the Universe, based on luminous galaxies and quasars seen out to billions of light-years.

'By combining these with new cosmic microwave background data from the European Planck satellite, there will be new opportunities to test the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion and hence the existence of dark energy.'

Professor Janet Drew of the University of Hertfordshire is leading the VPHAS+ survey which will image the central star-rich plane of the Milky Way and its central bulge, mapping the stellar and gaseous content.

She said: 'This survey will bring to galactic astronomy a huge resource, both in terms of excellent (and inspiring) imagery of the many nebulous regions it contains providing insights on how stars are born and die, and in terms of uniform quantitative photometry of 100s of millions of stars that will support the continuing effort to disentangle how our own dust-obscured galaxy is organized.'

A window to other words: The VST is based in Chile

About 30 terabytes (three million million bytes) of raw data will be produced by OmegaCAM each year. These data will be processed and archived at data centers in Europe including the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit (CASU).

