Abstract
In these latitudes, night falls quickly. At midday, the Atacama desert in Chile, drenched in heat under the almost vertical noonday sun, loses its shadows, its relief, and its colours, only to get them back at the close of day. To the west, a veil of white hugging the horizon has now become a layer of nearby cloud, and beneath this, a few kilometers away but invisible, lies the Pacific Ocean. Far away to the north-east, the peak of the volcano Licancabur (5916 m) and the snow-topped Andes form the horizon, above which the dark shadow of the Earth is now climbing.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
This anti-twilight arch is also known as the Belt of Venus. See Lynch and Livingston (2001).
- 3.
The name ‘Yepun’ was originally taken to refer to the star Sirius, but later research on the language of the Mapuche showed that it actually meant the ‘evening star’ and referred to the planet Venus: https://www.hq.eso.org/public/teles-instr/paranal-observatory/vlt/vlt-names/yepun/.
- 4.
On 27 November 1783, John Michell already had the idea of a black hole: www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200911/upload/November-2009.pdf.
- 5.
“If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun in the proportion of five hundred to one, and by supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae [inertial mass] with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it, by its own proper gravity.”
- 6.
One radian is a unit of angle equal to the angle subtended at the center of a circle of unit radius by an arc of length π on the circumference of that circle. It is equal to (180∕π) degrees, or about 60∘.
- 7.
This wonderful observation was published at the end of 2018 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics: Gravity Collaboration (2018).
- 8.
What is now called a Master 2 in France was then a Diplôme d’études approfondies or DEA.
- 9.
Democritus, lost text, quoted by Hippolytus in the third century AD.
- 10.
Albert Fert, born in 1938 and a student of Jacques Friedel, obtained the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2007 for his work on solid state physics, another area where French physicists excel.
References
Gravity Collaboration, Detection of the gravitational redshift in the orbit of the star S2 near the Galactic center massive black hole, Astron. Asrophys. 615, L15 (2018)
D. Lynch, W. Livingston, Colour and Light in Nature, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001)
A. Müller, M. Keppler et al., Orbital and atmospheric characterization of the planet within the gap of the PDS 70 transition disc. Astron. Astrophys. 617, L2 (2018). https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.11567
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Léna, P. (2020). One Night in Paranal. In: Astronomy’s Quest for Sharp Images. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55811-6_1
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