European Southern Observatory

It'll investigate some of the earliest galaxies that were formed just after the Big Bang.

Now, it's operated by the European Southern Observatory Group, ESO, an international organisation that's allowing people from around the world to come and use the telescope.

So its distinction is it won't see the Big Bang itself, George.

but it's going to come damn close to doing it.

That's me.

Now, Becky, were you, did you go on a little trip? Did I see you at the European Southern Observatory in

Germany? In Germany, yes, not in Chile.

I had a lot of colleagues who were like, you went to Chile? And I was like, sadly, no.

The follow-up was fast, and a lot of it came from southern telescopes.

Within about seven hours, a team using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope at Paranal in Chile with its X-shooter spectrograph had a redshift, 0.555. That's light that set out roughly five and a half billion years ago.

And the host galaxy turned out to be two galaxies, two knots of light about 8 kiloparsecs apart, moving within about 180 kilometers per second of each other, an interacting pair.

The afterglow was also tracked by GRAND, a seven-channel camera on the 2.2-meter telescope at Lasilla, by SMARTS at Cerro Tololo, and by the Master Robotic Telescope in South Africa.

around our country how vital scientific research is for our everyday lives and how it should be funded significantly because we only know that good consequences will come when we put in that money.

Yeah, the loss of funding for the European Southern Observatory project that we were involved in, that is such a massive blow.

That is devastating.

It is devastating and a phenomenal history, especially in astronomy, where we felt that way above our weight in terms of the global scale.

And with the European Southern Observatory, it was not only for the astrophysics and the observations of it all, it was actually for the instrumentation as well, which Australia is a world leader at.

And so the community right now, and speaking from coming from that astronomical community, is trying to figure out, well, what is next for us? Where can we maybe have different access to different telescopes to help support the goals to keep australia on top and all those trickle-down technologies that come from it all the instrumentation that ends up going into other sectors or those algorithms and those those skills for people that we train that end up going into other sectors all within this

I keep thinking of the LIGO experience that we had a few years ago where LIGO offered Australia a gravitational wave detector.

Yes.

The European Southern Observatory recently tracked a star named S301, and its orbital mechanics are just terrifying.

S301 has the tightest, fastest orbit we have ever recorded around our galactic center.

It completes a full lap around a supermassive black hole in just 8.7 years.

You can't cast a single piece of glass that size, so it's built from 798 hexagonal segments that act together as one surface.

And because the reflective coating wears out, ESO has made 133 spares as well, 931 segments in total, so that once the telescope is running, two segments a day can be swapped out for recoating without ever leaving a hole.

Two a day, every day, for the life of the telescope.

That's a job description.

And these aren't dinner plates.

Each hexagon is roughly one and a half meters across and only a few centimeters thick.

And ESO spec is that the surface is smooth to better than 10 nanometers, less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair.

Nearly 500 segments are now sitting at the ELT technical facility at Paranal.

But we don't see planets doing that in our solar system.

However... helpfully last year it turned out that there is one extra solar planet we know about or planet candidate at least that was that was detected or you know seems to have been detected last year so there's a binary system of brown dwarfs so it's their objects halfway between stars and planets you know completely different episode to talk about that but anyway the system is called 2m1510 it's 120 light years away in the direction of the constellation of libra And the ESO astronomers, the European Southern Observatory astronomers, think they found a planet that's going around them in a perpendicular orbit.

And that's really odd because, you know, Barry and I were saying about the formation of systems, it's strange.

You would imagine in that sort of system, you'd have planets some way out from the pair.