New observations from ESO’s Very Large Telescope have, for the first time, provided direct evidence that young galaxies can grow by sucking in the cool gas around them and using it as fuel for the formation of many new stars.

A telescope in Arizona has taken the sharpest pictures yet of deep space from Earth.

The next generation of adaptive optics has arrived at the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona, providing astronomers with a new level of image sharpness never before seen.

An Italian team of astronomers, scientists and historians says it has built a telescope using 17th-century astronomer Galileo Galilei's original design. The team spent two years getting the telescope ready for the International Year of Astronomy, which marks the 400th anniversary of Galileo's discoveries, including the then-heretical conclusion that the Earth revolved around the sun, not vice versa. The team from Florence's Museum of the History of Science and the national institutes of applied optics, nuclear physics and astrophysics worked with the Experimental Glass Station in Murano to produce the exact composition of the glass Galileo used for the lens of the telescope he created and described in his 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius (Starry Messenger). ''It was immediately clear that the telescope is not at all easy to use,'' said Giorgio Strano of the Museum of the History of Science. Francesco Palla of the National Institute of Astrophysics' Arcetri Observatory said the team has '

Using the newly installed AMBER instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, which combines the light from two or three 8.2-m Unit Telescopes thereby amounting to observe with a telescope of 40 to 90 metres in diameter, two international teams of astronomers observed with unprecedented detail the environment of two stars.