X-Shooter Spectrograph Installed on VLT

The largest facility for celestial observations owned by Europe – the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) – has recently received the first of its new upgrades, with the installation of the X-Shooter spectrograph, one of the many second-generation devices to be installed on the VLT. With this addition, the ground-based facility becomes one of the best in the world, and one of the few that can take full-spectrum (from near-infrared to ultraviolet) images of a celestial object in the exact same moment.

According to the team who put the new instrument together, the new spectrograph will primarily be used to record, trace and analyze gamma-ray bursts (GRB), coming from distant objects in the early Universe. With a sensitivity ranging from 300 nanometers (in the ultraviolet spectrum) to 2,400 nanometers (in infrared), the device is able to capture more than half the light that passes through the planet's atmosphere, and through its components. The 2.5-ton instrument was constructed in just five years, starting from December 2003.

“X-shooter offers a capability that is unique among astronomical instruments installed at large telescopes. Until now, different instruments at different telescopes and multiple observations were needed to cover this kind of wavelength range, making it very difficult to compare data, which, even though from the same object, could have been taken at different times and under different sky conditions,” Sandro D’Odorico said of the new tool. He has been the coordinator of the European group of scientists and engineers that built the wonderful machine. Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands and ESO played the most important part in the development of X-shooter.

“All in all, X-shooter can save us a factor of three or more in terms of precious telescope time and opens a new window of opportunity for the study of many, still poorly understood, celestial sources,” the expert added. “I am very confident that X-shooter will discover the most distant gamma-ray bursts in the Universe, or in other words, the first objects that formed in the young Universe,” the leader of the French part of the international team, François Hammer, shared. “The success of X-shooter and its relatively short completion time are a tribute to the quality and dedication of the many people involved in the project,” the ESO Director of Programs, Alan Moorwood, pinpointed.

With the completion of this remarkable project, X-shooter was installed on the VLT at the end of 2008, and took its first picture on March 14th, 2009. Its operators say that they expect the new instrument to become available for the astronomical community starting October 1st of this year. The VLT received more than a dozen instruments over the last ten years, but X-shooter is the first second-generation device to be installed. It was outfitted on the Cassegrain focus of the Kueyen telescope (UT2).