Latest INAF Stories

TUCSON, Ariz., March 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Today astronomers from the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) released the first series of scientific results showing its best-in-the-world performance in canceling the blur of the Earth's atmosphere. Included in these first findings are previously impossible discoveries about extrasolar planets and their environments and new insights into how stars are formed. The LBT is the first in the new generation of extraordinary large...

[ Video 1 ] | [ Video 2 ] VST captures collisions in young galaxy cluster The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile has imaged a fascinating collection of interacting galaxies in the Hercules galaxy cluster. The sharpness of the new picture, and the hundreds of galaxies captured in great detail in less than three hours of observations, attest to the great power of the VST and its huge camera OmegaCAM to explore the nearby Universe. The Hercules galaxy...

VST and 268 megapixel OmegaCAM start workThe VLT Survey Telescope (VST), the latest addition to ESO's Paranal Observatory, has made its first release of impressive images of the southern sky. The VST is a state-of-the-art 2.6-meter telescope, with the huge 268-megapixel camera OmegaCAM at its heart, which is designed to map the sky both quickly and with very fine image quality. It is a visible-light telescope that perfectly complements ESO's VISTA infrared survey telescope. New images of the...

A telescope in Arizona has taken the sharpest pictures yet of deep space from Earth. This new system provides a level of clarity never seen before. The technology uses adaptive optics, which is a mechanism that allows a telescope's mirror to bend in order to compensate for the blurring of light as it passes through the Earth's atmosphere. LBT scientists said the new system is installed on the $120 million Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham in Arizona.  The system is delivering...

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.Developed in a collaboration between Italy's Arcetri Observatory of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica, or INAF, and the University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, this technology represents a remarkable step forward for astronomy."This is an incredibly exciting time as this new adaptive optics system allows us to...

Tucson, Arizona -- The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) partners in the United States, Italy and Germany announced today that they achieved "first light" on Oct. 12, 2005. These exceptional images were obtained with one of the telescope's two primary mirrors in place and are being released today on the World Wide Web, http://www.lbto.org.This milestone marks the dawn of a new era in observing the Universe as the LBT will peer deeper into space than ever before, and with ten times the clarity...

The Universe was a more fertile place soon after it was formed than has previously been suspected. A team of French and Italian astronomers [1] made indeed the surprising discovery of a large and unknown population of distant galaxies observed when the Universe was only 10 to 30% its present age. This breakthrough is based on observations made with the Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) as part of the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey (VVDS). The VVDS started early 2002 on Melipal, one of the...

Large Population of Galaxies Found in the Young Universe with ESO's VLT ESO -- It is one of the major goals of observational cosmology to trace the way galaxies formed and evolved and to compare it to predictions from theoretical models. It is therefore essential to know as precisely as possible how many galaxies were present in the Universe at different epochs. This is easier to say than to do. Indeed, if counting galaxies from deep astronomical images is relatively straightforward,...

Astronomers Find Farthest Known Gamma-Ray Burst with ESO VLT ESO -- An Italian team of astronomers has observed the afterglow of a Gamma-Ray Burst that is the farthest known ever. With a measured redshift of 6.3, the light from this very remote astronomical source has taken 12,700 million years to reach us. It is thus seen when the Universe was less than 900 million years old, or less than 7 percent its present age. "This also means that it is among the intrinsically brightest Gamma-Ray...