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Published on 1 December 2001

Images of unprecedented sharpness: the first light of NAOS, the adaptive optics of the VLT, is a success

"The spots are well centered on the wavefront sensor. The turbulence is fairly good, the signal-to-noise sufficient, therefore the image MUST be almost...
Published on 1 December 2001

A Small Spherical Universe after All?

What is the shape of space? Is it finite or infinite? Is it connected, has it "edges", "holes" or "handles"? This cosmic mystery, which has puzzled...
Published on 1 December 2001

Delivery of GIRAFFE: multi-fibers spectrograph for the VLT

The Observatoire de Paris just sent to ESO at Garching the GIRAFFE spectrograph. GIRAFFE is a multi-fiber spectrograph working at intermediate resolution...
Published on 1 December 2001

First Fringes at VLTI and Application to Cepheids

On October 29, 2001, the first fringes were obtained by the optical interferometer VLTI (ESO-VLT), by combining the light coming from the two 8m-telescopes...
Published on 1 November 2001

A New Bar in the Center of the Milky Way

The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, and contains as two thirds of them a stellar bar in its center. The presence of this bar is suggested by Doppler...
Published on 1 November 2001

Painting with oxygen and hydrogen

A new image from the Hubble Space Telescope is an example of ’painting with light’. Astronomers use the separated colours produced by oxygen and hydrogen to...
Published on 1 October 2001

Cold atomic matter in the Universe Circmstellar shells around Asymptotic Giant Branch stars

Stars of mass comparable to the Sun (Mo) and up to 5-6 Mo, after having spent several billions of years burning quietly hydrogen into helium inside their...
Published on 1 October 2001

"What goes around comes around..."

The environment of a galaxy cluster represents an ideal laboratory for testing the behaviour of the interstellar matter under extreme conditions. One of the...
Published on 1 September 2001

FIRST COMPUTATIONS OF THE ORBITS IN A BINARY BLACK HOLE SYSTEM

In Newtonian theory of gravitation, the determination of the orbits in a system of two point-like bodies is an elementary problem. The classical result,...
Published on 1 September 2001

The problem of the light polarization on the quiet Sun: the contribution of THEMIS

The problem of the light polarization on the quiet Sun: the contribution of THEMIS It has been known for a long time that the polarization measured at the...