1/4 "All those protoplanetary discs will be lost, like tears in a rain of ultraviolet photons."
Ok, it doesn't sound as cool as the actual quote, but still 😉
This tear-shaped object is a protoplanetary disc –the birthplace of planets around another star– observed with ESO's Very Large Telescope. Material from the disc is being stripped away by a bright star beyond the upper-right corner, outside of the field of view, hence this cometary shape.
2/4 This type of object is known as "proplyd", short for "protoplanetary disc", although the term is most often associated to discs being ionised by other bright nearby stars.
This particular object is called 177-341 W and is located in the Orion Nebula, as shown below. Thanks to adaptive optics we can correct atmospheric turbulence and get super sharp images!
3/4 The data was obtained with the MUSE instrument at the VLT. MUSE doesn't take images per se. Instead, it breaks the light coming from every single location within its field of view into a rainbow or spectrum, which tells us a lot about the physical properties of this object.
Soon the telescope platform at ESO's Paranal Observatory in #Chile will look very different at night: all four of the 8.2 m telescopes of the VLT will be equipped with lasers! This is one of the ongoing upgrades of the GRAVITY+ instrument, which will allow us to study black holes, stars and planets like never before.
Après 9 ans et demi de tentatives, me voici recruté en tant qu'astronome-adjoint à l'Observatoire de Paris : ne comptez pas sur moi pour cacher ma joie et mon bonheur. Quel honneur en plus d'être si bien entouré sur cette liste, bravo à toutes et à tous.
a simple webpage that adds an extra url parameter to your search to return a de-enshittified list of results –– or at least as de-enshittified as Google results can be nowadays.