THE clearest views so far of dusty discs surrounding both newborn and ageing stars have been captured by an observatory in Chile. The striking results raise hopes that the same instrument might soon catch our first glimpse of giant planets orbiting close to sun-like stars.
The observations were made using the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), a telescope array run by the European Southern Observatory atop the 2635-metre mountain Paranal in Chile’s Atacama desert. A new instrument called AMBER combines infrared light from either two or three 8.2-metre telescopes, making an instrument that effectively has the resolution of a telescope…
