Found 9 talks width keyword VLT

MOONS is a 0.8 to 1.8 microns multi-object spectrometer for the Nasmyth focus of UT1 that is being built by a consortium led by the UK-ATC. The instrument is fibre fed, has a multiplex of 1000 and covers a total field of 25 arc minutes in diameter with a high transmission. There are two spectral resolving powers, ~4000 spanning the full wavelength range and a higher resolution mode which gives ~9000 in the I window and ~20,000 in a region in H windows. The instrument itself has two main parts:

• The rotating front-end which is at the focal plane and houses the fibre positioners, acquisition system, metrology system for the fibres, etc., and
• The cryogenic spectrograph which houses the spectrograph optics, VPH gratings and detectors.

MOONS is now approaching completion and is due to be shipped to Paranal in March 2024. This talk presents the MOONS instrument, the science that it will allow, and its current status.

The search for extrasolar planets is one of the fastest-growing fields of astronomy. This rapid growth was both made possible by the development of instrumentation and motivated it, creating a virtuous cycle that impacted positively several fields of research.

In this talk I will present the latest planet-hunting spectrograph ESPRESSO, installed at ESO's VLT. Targeting a radial velocity precision of 10 cm/s, ESPRESSO has the declared goal of detecting an Earth-mass planet inside the habitable zone of a main-sequence dwarf star. I will discuss the first results, ongoing campaigns, and reveal a bit of what the future holds for us.

Thanks to its unique capabilities, the MUSE integral field spectrograph at ESO VLT has given us new insight of the Universe at high redshift. In this talk I will review some breakthrough in the observation of the Hubble Ultra Deep field with MUSE including the discovery of a new population of faint galaxies without HST counterpart in the UDF and the ubiquitous presence of extended Lyman-alpha haloes around galaxies.

In contrast with low-mass young stellar objects (LMYSOs), very little is known about high-mass YSOs (HMYSOs). Latest results indicate that HMYSOs might be born in a similar way as LMYSOs, i.e., through disc accretion and jet ejection. HMYSOs are deeply embedded in their parent cloud and are at kpc distance, hindering direct imaging of their accretion discs. Jets then become essential to understand the physical properties of the central source. High-resolution near-IR VLT instruments allow us to study HMYSO jets down to au scales and compare them with the low-mass regime. In this talk, I will present VLT/ISAAC, SINFONI, and CRIRES results on two HMYSOs. Spectro-astrometry is used to retrieve information about the jet down to mas scales (~tens of au at kpc distance). High-resolution spectroscopy allows us to retrieve the kinematic and dynamic properties of the massive jets. Additionally, HST imaging in the [FeII] shows the jet structure close to the star. Finally, these properties are compared with low-mass jets, suggesting that the formation of HMYSOs might be a scaled-up version of their low-mass counterparts, and their properties scale with mass.

ESO is an intergovernmental organization for astronomy founded in 1962 by five countries. It currently has 14 Member States in Europe with Brazil poised to join as soon as the Accession Agreement has been ratified. Together these countries represent approximately 30 percent of the world’s astronomers. ESO operates optical/infrared observatories on La Silla and Paranal in Chile, partners in the sub-millimeter radio observatories APEX and ALMA on Chajnantor and is about to start construction of the Extremely Large Telescope on Armazones.

La Silla hosts various robotic telescopes and experiments as well as the NTT and the venerable 3.6m telescope. The former had a key role in the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the latter hosts the ultra-stable spectrograph HARPS which is responsible for the discovery of nearly two-thirds of all confirmed exoplanets with masses below that of Neptune. On Paranal the four 8.2m units of the Very Large Telescope, the Interferometer and the survey telescopes VISTA and VST together constitute an integrated system which supports 16 powerful facility instruments, including adaptive-optics-assisted imagers and integral-field spectrographs, with half a dozen more on the way and the Extremely Large Telescope with its suite of instruments to be added to this system in about ten years time. Scientific highlights include the characterisation of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, the first image of an exoplanet, studies of gamma-ray bursts enabled by the Rapid Response Mode and milliarcsec imaging of evolved stars and active galactic nuclei. The single dish APEX antenna, equipped with spectrometers and wide-field cameras, contributes strongly to the study of high-redshift galaxies and of star- and planet-formation. Early Science results obtained with the ALMA interferometer already demonstrate its tremendous potential for observations of the cold Universe.

MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) is a 2nd generation Integral Field facility for the VLT. With a field of view of 1x1 arcmin, fine sampling, intermediate spectral resolution and large spectral coverage in the visible, it uses a complex image slicer, twenty-four parallel spectrographs and a large detector area. In addition, MUSE is conceived to work assisted by the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), which will enhance notably its performance. MUSE is the result of ten years of design and development by the MUSE consortium — headed by the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, France and the partner institutes Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP, Germany),  Institut für Astrophysik Göttingen (IAG, Germany),  Institute for Astronomy ETH Zurich (Switzerland), L'Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP, France), Nederlandse Onderzoekschool voor de Astronomie (NOVA, the Netherlands) and ESO.
MUSE has been successfully installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). In this talk it will be presented the instrument, its design and challenges, the integration (both in Europe and Paranal), the first light and first commissioning results.

The visible survey spectrometers, VIMOS and FLAMES, have need in successful operation for nearly a decade. and within the next few weeks these will be joined by KMOS and near IR mulit-IFU spectrometer. There are also two new instruments in their early design stages, MOONS a near IR Fibre fed spectrometer and 4MOST a visible fibre fed spectrometer. This talk will present these instruments and the observing opportunity that these will provide.

VIMOS is visible multi-object spectrometer operating on the VLT.  The high multiplex of the VLT visible imager and multi object/integral-field spectrometer, VIMOS, makes it a powerful instrument for large-scale spectroscopic surveys of faint sources. Following community input and recommendations by ESO's Science and Technology Committee, it was decided to upgrade the instrument in phases. The first phase of the upgrade is described and included changing the shutters, installing an active flexure compensation system, replacing the detectors with CCDs with a far better red sensitivity and less fringing, and improving the data reduction pipeline.