European Southern Observatory

About: European Southern Observatory is a facility organization based out in Garching bei München, Germany. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Galaxy & Stars. The organization has 3594 authors who have published 16157 publications receiving 823095 citations. The organization is also known as: The European Southern Observatory，ESO & ESO.

Southern massive stars at high angular resolution: observational campaign and companion detection

Abstract: Multiplicity is one of the most fundamental observable properties of massive O-type stars and offers a promising way to discriminate between massive star formation theories. Nevertheless, companions at separations between 1 and 100 milliarcsec (mas) remain mostly unknown due to intrinsic observational limitations. At a typical distance of 2 kpc, this corresponds to projected physical separations of 2–200 AU. The Southern MAssive Stars at High angular resolution survey (smash+) was designed to fill this gap by providing the first systematic interferometric survey of Galactic massive stars. We observed 117 O-type stars with VLTI/PIONIER and 162 O-type stars with NACO/ Sparse Aperture Masking (SAM), probing the separation ranges 1–45 and 30–250 mas and brightness contrasts of Δ H< 4 and Δ H< 5, respectively. Taking advantage of NACO’s field of view, we further uniformly searched for visual companions in an 8 �� radius down to ΔH = 8. This paper describes observations and data analysis, reports the discovery of almost 200 new companions in the separation range from 1 mas to 8 �� and presents a catalog of detections, including the first resolved measurements of over a dozen known long-period spectroscopic binaries. Excluding known runaway stars for which no companions are detected, 96 objects in our main sample ( δ< 0 ◦ ; H< 7.5) were observed both with PIONIER and NACO/SAM. The fraction of these stars with at least one resolved companion within 200 mas is 0.53. Accounting for known but unresolved spectroscopic or eclipsing companions, the multiplicity fraction at separation ρ< 8 �� increases to fm = 0.91 ± 0.03. The fraction of luminosity class V stars that have a bound companion reaches 100% at 30 mas while their average number of physically connected companions within 8 �� is fc = 2.2 ± 0.3. This demonstrates that massive stars form nearly exclusively in multiple systems. The nine non-thermal radio emitters observed by smash+ are all resolved, including the newly discovered pairs HD 168112 and CPD−47 ◦ 2963. This lends strong support to the universality of the wind-wind collision

NAOS, the first AO system of the VLT: on-sky performance

Abstract: NAOS is the first adaptive optics system installed at the VLT 8m telescopes. It was designed, manufactured and tested by a french Consortium under an ESO contract, to provide compensated images to the high angular resolution IR spectro-imaging camera (CONICA) in the 1 to 5 μ m spectral range. It is equipped with a 185 actuator deformable mirror, a tip/tilt mirror and two wavefront sensors, one in the visible and one in the near IR spectral range. It has been installed in November at the Nasmyth focus B of the VLT UT4. During the first light run in December 2001, NAOS has delivered a Strehl ratio of 50 under average seeing conditions for bright guide stars. The diffraction limit of the telescope has been achieved at 2.2 μ m . The closed loop operation has been very robust under bad seeing conditions. It was also possible to obtain a substantial correction with m V=17.6 and m K=13.1 reference stars. The on-sky acceptance tests of NAOS-CONICA were completed in May 2002 and the instrument will be made available to the European astronomical community in October by ESO. This paper describes the system and present the on-sky performance in terms of Strehl ratio, seeing conditions and guide star magnitude.

Mean proper motions, space orbits, and velocity dispersion profiles of Galactic globular clusters derived from Gaia DR2 data

Abstract: We have derived the mean proper motions and space velocities of 154 Galactic globular clusters and the velocity dispersion profiles of 141 globular clusters based on a combination of Gaia DR2 proper motions with ground-based line-of-sight velocities. Combining the velocity dispersion profiles derived here with new measurements of the internal mass functions allows us to model the internal kinematics of 144 clusters, more than 90 per cent of the currently known Galactic globular cluster population. We also derive the initial cluster masses by calculating the cluster orbits backwards in time applying suitable recipes to account for mass-loss and dynamical friction. We find a correlation between the stellar mass function of a globular cluster and the amount of mass lost from the cluster, pointing to dynamical evolution as one of the mechanisms shaping the mass function of stars in clusters. The mass functions also show strong evidence that globular clusters started with a bottom-light initial mass function. Our simulations show that the currently surviving globular cluster population has lost about 80 per cent of its mass since the time of formation. If globular clusters started from a lognormal mass function, we estimate that the Milky Way contained about 500 globular clusters initially, with a combined mass of about 2.5 × 10 M. For a power-law initial mass function, the initial mass in globular clusters could have been a factor of three higher.

The Chandra Deep Field-South Survey: 2 Ms Source Catalogs

Abstract: We present point-source catalogs for the ≈2 Ms exposure of the Chandra Deep Field-South (CDF-S); this is one of the two most sensitive X-ray surveys ever performed. The survey covers an area of ≈436 arcmin^2 and reaches on-axis sensitivity limits of ≈1.9 × 10^(−17) and ≈1.3 × 10^(−16) ergs cm^(−2) s^(−1) for the 0.5-2.0 and 2-8 keV bands, respectively. Four hundred and sixty-two X-ray point sources are detected in at least one of three X-ray bands that were searched; 135 of these sources are new compared to the previous ≈1 Ms CDF-S detections. Source positions are determined using centroid and matched-filter techniques; the median positional uncertainty is ≈0.36''. The X-ray-to-optical flux ratios of the newly detected sources indicate a variety of source types; ≈55% of them appear to be active galactic nuclei, while ≈45% appear to be starburst and normal galaxies. In addition to the main Chandra catalog, we provide a supplementary catalog of 86 X-ray sources in the ≈2 Ms CDF-S footprint that was created by merging the ≈250 ks Extended Chandra Deep Field-South with the CDF-S; this approach provides additional sensitivity in the outer portions of the CDF-S. A second supplementary catalog that contains 30 X-ray sources was constructed by matching lower significance X-ray sources to bright optical counterparts (R < 23.8); the majority of these sources appear to be starburst and normal galaxies. The total number of sources in the main and supplementary catalogs is 578. Optical R-band counterparts and basic optical and infrared photometry are provided for the X-ray sources in the main and supplementary catalogs. We also include existing spectroscopic redshifts for 224 of the X-ray sources. The average backgrounds in the 0.5-2.0 and 2-8 keV bands are 0.066 and 0.167 counts Ms^(−1) pixel^(−1), respectively, and the background counts follow Poisson distributions. The effective exposure times and sensitivity limits of the CDF-S are now comparable to those of the ≈2 Ms Chandra Deep Field-North (CDF-N). We also present cumulative number counts for the main catalog and compare the results to those for the CDF-N. The soft-band number counts for these two fields agree well with each other at fluxes higher than ≈2 × 10^(−16) ergs cm^(−2) s^(−1), while the CDF-S number counts are up to ≈25% smaller than those for the CDF-N at fluxes below ≈2 × 10^(−16) ergs cm^(−2) s^(−1) in the soft band and ≈2 × 10^(−15) ergs cm^(−2) s^(−1) in the hard band, suggesting small field-to-field variations.