Subscribe to esonews mailing list. eso0948 — Science Release
Brightness Variations of Sun-like Stars: The Mystery Deepens —
Astronomers facing Socratic “ignorance” 7 December 2009: An
extensive study made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope deepens a
long-standing mystery in the study of stars similar to the Sun.
Unusual year-long variations in the brightness of about one
third of all Sun-like stars during the latter stages of their
lives still remain unexplained. Over the past few decades,
astronomers have offered many possible explanations, but the
new, painstaking observations contradict them all and only
deepen the mystery. The search for a suitable interpretation is
on. eso0947 — Science Release 3 December 2009: The young star
cluster Trumpler 14 is revealed in another stunning ESO image.
The amount of exquisite detail seen in this portrait, which
beautifully reveals the life of a large family of stars, is due
to the Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) on
ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Never befo