VLT

Comets are chemistry with a long memory. The ices in one were frozen out of the disk of gas and dust that built its planets, and they have sat in the cold ever since; bring one close to a star and…

A white dwarf that abruptly reignited in 1996 has now been confirmed as a Wolf-Rayet-type star, with new spectroscopy from the Very Large Telescope providing the first direct measurement of its…

Astronomers have mapped the gas in nine nearby galaxies whose central black holes are actively pulling in matter, and found the same arrangement in every one: rings of new stars well out from the…

Almost every massive star in the galaxy has a companion, and almost everything known about those pairs comes from looking at them long after they finished forming. By then the orbit has had millions…

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer in Chile have detected a star that circles the black hole at the center of the Milky Way once every 8.7…

Nine massive galaxies that stopped making stars long ago hold far more small, faint stars than the Milky Way's mix would predict, astronomers report — enough that the earliest big galaxies found by…