astronomy

In a press release, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) warns that a huge industrial complex threatens the skies above the Paranal Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert. According to ESO, on 24 December, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the US electricity company AES Corporation, submitted for environmental impact assessment a project for a huge industrial complex that would be located between 5 and 11 kilometres from the Paranal telescopes. This astronomical observatory, the darkest in the world, has led to important breakthroughs, such as the first image of an exoplanet or the confirmation of the accelerated expansion of the universe.

Two decades of work with numerous setbacks, a budget of more than 10 billion dollars and a journey of 1.5 million kilometres to provide us with images of the universe in unprecedented detail have led Science magazine to choose the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as the science breakthrough of 2022.

After the scientific success and popularity of the Hubble and James Webb space megatelescopes, there are other smaller telescopes with important missions. This is the case of the European Space Agency's PLATO, whose telescopes will have the challenge of searching for exoplanets by monitoring hundreds of thousands of stars.

Romano Corradi, director of the Gran Telescopio de Canarias, assesses the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, an international collaboration of the space agencies of the United States (NASA), Europe (ESA) and Canada (CSA).

An analysis published in Nature Astronomy quantifies the risk to human life posed by impacts of space rocket fragments on Earth, which are more likely to occur in the southern part of the planet.