ESO Very Large Telescope (Paranal Observatory)

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) is the European Southern Observatory’s flagship facility, at 2,635 meters on Cerro Paranal in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Its four 8.2-meter Unit Telescopes, the first of which saw first light on May 25, 1998, can work alone or combine their light as the VLT Interferometer (VLTI), with baselines up to 130 meters. By total light-collecting area, Paranal is the largest optical-infrared observatory in the Southern Hemisphere.

Flagship instruments

• GRAVITY on the VLTI: combines the telescopes to follow stars around the Milky Way’s central black hole.
• SPHERE and ERIS: high-contrast imagers that photograph faint planets and companions next to bright stars.
• ESPRESSO, CRIRES+ and UVES: precision spectrographs for planet masses, atmospheres and chemistry.
• MUSE, X-shooter and KMOS: spectroscopy of stars and galaxies.
• MOONS: about 1,000 robotic fibers observing about 1,000 targets at once; first light on September 3, 2026.

Recent results

In 2026 GRAVITY found S301, the fastest known star in the Milky Way, which reaches about 25,000 km/s as it swings past Sagittarius A*. SPHERE delivered the clearest image yet of Betelgeuse’s companion, ERIS made Beta Pictoris d the faintest exoplanet imaged from the ground, CRIRES+ found a candidate exomoon around a brown dwarf, ESPRESSO measured winds on seven hot Jupiters that point to magnetic fields, and UVES showed that interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS likely formed around a star older than the Sun. This extends ESO-based Galactic center work that shared the 2020 Nobel Prize with Keck’s stellar-orbit measurements.

What to watch, 2026-2030

• MOONS moves from first light into commissioning and science operations. ESO has also announced the MAVIS and BlueMUSE instruments, without published dates.
• March 2029: planned first light of ESO’s 39-meter Extremely Large Telescope, 23 km away on Cerro Armazones.

Why scientists are converging here

Few facilities combine 8-meter mirrors, interferometry and extreme adaptive optics on one mountain. That combination is what exoplanet imaging and black hole orbit tracking now demand, and the techniques refined at Paranal are the ones the ELT will inherit.