Stunning images taken by powerful new alien-hunting telescopes reveal the raw beauty of our skies

Stunning images taken by new alien-hunting telescopes in Chile reveal the raw beauty of our skies.  

The four telescopes are looking for habitable planets around nearby ultra-cool stars from the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in northern Chile.

After finishing this commissioning phase at the end of this month, this impressive array of super-powerful planet-hunting telescopes will begin scientific operations.  

The SPECULOOS Southern Observatory (SSO) is at the core of the exoplanet-hunting project and these are the initial engineering and calibration images — a process known as first light.

The SSO project consists of four telescopes equipped with three-foot (one metre) primary mirrors.

The telescopes — named Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto after the four Galilean moons of Jupiter — are at the same plae as ESO's flagship Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal.

This is a near-perfect site for astronomy, with dark skies and a stable, arid climate.

The telescopes will search for Earth-sized planets surrounding ultra-cool stars of brown dwarfs, whose planetary populations are still mostly unexplored.

Only a few exoplanets have been found orbiting such stars, and even fewer lie within their parent star's habitable zone.

Although these dim stars are difficult to observe they are abundant and make up around 15 per cent of stars in the universe.

SPECULOOS is designed to explore 1000 such stars, including the nearest, brightest, and smallest, in search of Earth-sized habitable planets.

“SPECULOOS gives us an unprecedented ability to detect terrestrial planets eclipsing some of our smallest and coolest neighbouring stars,” said Michaël Gillon of the University of Liège, principal investigator of the SPECULOOS project.

“This is a unique opportunity to uncover the details of these nearby worlds.”

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