What the European Southern Observatory has to offer and how you can use it

Colloquium talk given at the University of Belgrade in 2017 as an overview of ESO and how to apply for observing time


The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is the leading astronomical observatory in the world operating three world-class sites all situated in the Atacama desert in Chile. It offers access to all its telescopes to all astronomers world-wide not only to its members. This includes state-of-the-art observations as a community service but all excellent opportunities to work directly at ESO at all career stages. I will give a quick overview of ESO's observing facilities and show how to access them including advice on proposal writing. In the final part, the ESO fellow and studentship programmes in hosted Germany and Chile will be presented. This presentation is planned to be very informal and interactive so that we can concentrate on the main interests of the audience.

What the European Southern Observatory has to offer and how you can use it by Daniel Asmus on Scribd

Resolving the dust structure in active galactic nuclei

Colloquium talk given at the Observatory of Belgrade in 2017 as an overview of high angular resolution imaging of AGN

The nuclei of many galaxies shine bright throughout all the electromagnetic spectrum. This powerful emission if often brighter than all the star light of the galaxy combined. Its source is an accreting supermassive black hole in the galaxy center. However, around half of the accretion disk emission does not escape the nuclear region but is instead absorbed by an unknown dust structure and reemitted in the infrared. I will present an overview of our attempts to detect and resolve this dust structure in nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN) and review the surprising results emerging from recent highest angular resolution observations.

Resolving the dust structure in active galactic nuclei by Daniel Asmus on Scribd