In November 2025, four lasers pierced the sky above Cerro Paranal (Chile) from ESO’s four 8-metre telescopes, creating artificial stars used by adaptive optics to correct for atmospheric turbulence. This spectacular firing marks a key milestone in the GRAVITY+ project, a major upgrade to the VLTI to which LIRA is actively contributing, and which improves both observational power and sky coverage.
This image offers a rare perspective by bringing together in a single view : the scattering of laser beams in the lower atmosphere, the artificial stars formed at an altitude of 90 km, and the observed object — a cluster of massive stars in the Tarantula Nebula, within the Large Magellanic Cloud, 170,000 light-years away.
