Untitled - ESO

ture early in 007. The 3 -CCD-mosaic
OmegaCAM wide-field optical camera for
the VST, which was developed by ESO,
was, however, finished. The primary
mirror of the telescope is also now ready,
in Moscow.
In June the VLT cryogenic high-resolution
infrared echelle spectrograph CRIRES
was commissioned at the Nasmyth focus
of Antu, marking the completion of the
first-generation VLT instrumentation. First
steps of Science Verification also took
place during the year and work was progressing
very well on developing a de-
dicated pipeline for the CRIRES data reduction.
At the same time, the near-infrared imager
HAWK-I, often described as a VLT
‘generation 1.5’ instrument, was in an
advanced stage, undergoing Assembly
and Integration at ESO Garching, paving
the way for a shipment to Chile in 007.
Important progress was also achieved
with respect to the second-generation
instrumentation. In September, an agreement
was signed with an extended
consortium led by LAOG in Grenoble to
develop SPHERE. The revised design
fulfils all the requirements set by the ESO
Scientific Technical Committee (STC) for
the planet-finder instrument.
Meanwhile, the multi-conjugate adap-
tive optics demonstrator (MAD) was successfully
tested in the laboratory in
Garching, passing its PAE (Preliminary
Acceptance Europe) in December and
thus being ready to go to Chile.
All of these instruments constitute technological
marvels; we are thrilled by their
ingenious design and capabilities, for
they allow us to do science at the cuttingedge.
This is undoubtedly also the case
for AMBER, the interferometric beam
combiner for the VLTI, which was offered
to the scientific community from P 76, and
it is gratifying to see a string of truly impressive
scientific results, scheduled to
appear in a special issue of A&A in March
007.
AMBER is not the only facility to have this
honour, as in July 006 the submillimetric
telescope APEX was also the topic of
8
ESO Annual Report 006
a special A&A issue, with no fewer than
6 articles based on early science being
published.
Although some of the great scientific
achievements made with ESO’s telescopes
are published in the Research
Highlights, I cannot resist mentioning
a few. In January, the discovery of the
smallest exoplanet found so far, a five-
Earth-mass planet, was announced.
The planet was discovered by microlensing,
with the help of a worldwide network
of telescopes, among which the 1.5-m
Danish telescope at La Silla was the one
that could pick up the signal due to the
planet. This discovery heralds a new era
in the search for exoplanets. The identification,
also at La Silla but with the 3.6-m
telescope this time, of a planetary system
containing three Neptune-mass planets
and an asteroid belt, is also of crucial
importance in this very hot research area.
With the VLT, astronomers have found
possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the
globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Indeed,
some hot, bright, and apparently young
stars in the cluster present less carbon
and oxygen than the majority of their sisters,
indicating that these few stars likely
formed by taking their material from another
star. Farther away, the combination
of adaptive optics techniques with the
new SINFONI integral-field spectrograph
allowed astronomers to study a very distant
galaxy with a record-breaking resolution
of a mere 0.15 arcseconds, giving
an unprecedented detailed view of the
anatomy of such a distant proto-disc galaxy.
The observations imply that large
disc galaxies akin to our Milky Way must
have formed on a rapid timescale, only
three billion years after the Big Bang.
With the VISIR instrument, astronomers
have mapped the disc around a star
more massive than the Sun. The very extended
and flared disc most likely contains
enough gas and dust to spawn planets.
It appears as a precursor of debris
discs such as those around Vega-like
stars and thus provides the rare opportunity
to witness the conditions prevailing
prior to or during planet formation. The
huge gain in resolving power offered
by the VLTI also made a difference. VINCI
and MIDI were used to discover envelopes
around three Cepheids, massive
pulsating stars that play a crucial role
in cosmology, being one of the first steps
on the cosmic distance ladder.
Of course, these are but a few examples
of the science that is based on observations
with ESO telescopes. In fact, on
average, our user community produces
close to two papers with ESO data a day
all year round, more than any other
ground-based observatory in the world.
ESO telescopes generate a large quantity
of data, which are kept for reuse in the
Science Archive. With the coming online
of VISTA, and later of the VST, the flow
of data will considerably increase, reaching
100 TB of data per year. To anticipate
this, ESO is preparing a Petabyte-class
archive that will be ready next year.
In July, the first data release of the UKIRT
Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS)
was available, providing a year of data to
the ESO community of users. The full survey
is expected to take seven years. But
this first set of observations already
shows how powerful the full survey will
be at finding rare objects that hold vital
clues to how stars and galaxies in our
Universe formed. Indeed, the new data
on young galaxies is already challenging
current thinking on galaxy formation,
revealing galaxies that are massive at a
much earlier stage of development than
anticipated.
In 005, the ALMA project was set on
track with major industrial contracts
being awarded. The year 006 was a year
of construction: the road from the highway
to the high site, the AOS, was completed
at its full width, and construction
of the buildings at the OSF, at 900 m
altitude, began at full speed. The road
and the OSF buildings are deliverables for
which ESO is responsible.
In Europe, the first cryostats and receivers
for two frequency bands were delivered.
By now, prototypes are available
for all four ALMA frequencies (0.6, 0.9,
1.3 and 3 mm), fulfilling specifications. For
the cryostats, a first series of eight was