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On This Day In Space: Oct. 5, 1962: Happy Birthday, European Southern Observatory!

On This Day In Space: Oct. 5, 1962: Happy Birthday, European Southern Observatory!_651ec34731e9d.jpeg

On. Oct. 5, 1962, the European Southern Observatory was born!

The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an intergovernmental research organization made up of 16 nations that work together to study the southern sky. Before ESO, all the major ground-based telescopes in the world were in the Northern Hemisphere. So ESO built some really big and really awesome telescopesin Chile.

Tthe European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory, one of the Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs) comprising ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). (Image credit: ESO/Y. Beletsky)

With these telescopes, scientists have discovered exoplanets like Proxima b, they’ve found the oldest star in the Milky Way, and they’ve shown that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

On This Day in Space Archive!

Still not enough space? Don’t forget to check out our Space Image of the Day, and on the weekends our Best Space Photos and Top Space News Stories of the week.

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