20 May 2021
ESO observatories operated under challenging conditions in 2020 due to the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, having to reduce and even pause scientific observations for a few months. Nonetheless, 2020 was still a very productive year for the observatory with regard to the number of papers that were published using data from ESO telescopes, mostly obtained in previous years. A recently published report from the ESO library shows that 2020 represents the fourth consecutive year that over 1000 scientific studies using ESO data were published.
Of the 608 studies carried out using observations from the VLT and VLTI, 336 (55%) used data from the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE), the Ultraviolet-Visual Echelle Spectrograph (UVES), or from the X-shooter spectrograph. These were the three most productive VLT instruments in 2020, as was the case in 2019.
There was a time not too many decades ago when an astronomer suggesting the existence of life-bearing planets beyond our solar system would be considered heresy, albeit without the punishment of house arrest suffered by Galileo until his death in 1642.
Fast forward to 2019, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, using HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) on the ESO 3.6-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star, 51 Pegasi b, later formally named Dimidium. They would share the prize “for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos” with James Peebles, Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science at Princeton University.