eso0920 — Organisation Release Most Efficient Spectrograph to
Shoot the Southern Skies 25 May 2009 ESO’s Very Large Telescope
— Europe’s flagship facility for ground-based astronomy — has
been equipped with the first of its second generation
instruments: X-shooter. It can record the entire spectrum of a
celestial object in one shot — from the ultraviolet to the near-
infrared — with high sensitivity. This unique new instrument
will be particularly useful for the study of distant exploding
objects called gamma-ray bursts. “X-shooter offers a capability
that is unique among astronomical instruments installed at large
telescopes,” says Sandro D’Odorico, who coordinated the Europe-
wide consortium of scientists and engineers that built this
remarkable instrument. “Until now, different instruments at
different telescopes and multiple observations were needed to
cover this kind of wavelength range, making it very difficult to
compare data, which, even though from the same object, could
have been taken at different ti