ESO/MPE: First Light for Future Black Hole Probe
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2016 4:50 pm
First Light for Future Black Hole Probe
Successful Commissioning of GRAVITY at the VLTI
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE)
ESO Organisation Release | 2016 Jan 13
Successful Commissioning of GRAVITY at the VLTI
Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE)
ESO Organisation Release | 2016 Jan 13
[img3="GRAVITY discovers new double star in Orion Trapezium ClusterZooming in on black holes is the main mission for the newly installed instrument GRAVITY at ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. During its first observations, GRAVITY successfully combined starlight using all four Auxiliary Telescopes. The large team of European astronomers and engineers, led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, who designed and built GRAVITY, are thrilled with the performance. During these initial tests, the instrument has already achieved a number of notable firsts. This is the most powerful VLT Interferometer instrument yet installed.
Credit: ESO/GRAVITY consortium/NASA/ESA/M. McCaughrean"]http://cdn.eso.org/images/screen/eso1601a.jpg[/img3][hr][/hr]
The GRAVITY instrument combines the light from multiple telescopes to form a virtual telescope up to 200 metres across, using a technique called interferometry. This enables the astronomers to detect much finer detail in astronomical objects than is possible with a single telescope.
Since the summer of 2015, an international team of astronomers and engineers led by Frank Eisenhauer (MPE, Garching, Germany) has been installing the instrument in specially adapted tunnels under the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in northern Chile [1]. This is the first stage of commissioning GRAVITY within the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). A crucial milestone has now been reached: for the first time, the instrument successfully combined starlight from the four VLT Auxiliary Telescopes [2]. ...