European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: ESO

Artists impression of stellar evolution. Credit ESA

An extensive study made with ESO’s Very Large Telescope deepens a long-standing mystery in the study of stars similar to the Sun. Unusual year-long variations in the brightness of about one third of all Sun-like stars during the latter stages of their lives still remain unexplained. Over the past few decades, astronomers have offered many possible explanations, but the new, painstaking observations contradict them all and only deepen the mystery. The search for a suitable interpretation is on.

The release and an image are available on:
http://www.eso.org/public/outreach/press-rel/pr-2009/pr-48-09.html

ESOcast is one of the fantastic resources for classroom that are now available online.

Some off the podcasts that are presented are very usefull like “ESOcast 11: 32 New Exoplanets Found” that presents how exoplanets are being discovered at La Silla using the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher, better known as HARPS, the spectrograph for ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope.
The number of available casts is still small, but we hope them to grow quick in the future.

(See ESOcast’s webpage)

Source: ESO 47/09 – Photo Release

Trumpler 14 image obtained with Multi-conjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD)
mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope. Credit: ESO/VLT

The young star cluster Trumpler 14 is revealed in another stunning ESO image. Never before has such a large patch of sky been imaged using adaptive optics, a technique by which astronomers are able to remove most of the atmosphere’s blurring effects. (Read more)

Source: ESO 46/09 – Science Release