page_title: VLT Survey Telescope
section_title: VST surveys
hierarchical_section_title: VLT Survey Telescope / VST surveys
caption_attribution_description: English: The first results have been released from a major new dark matter survey of the southern skies using ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. The project, known as the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), uses imaging from the VST and its huge camera, OmegaCAM to analyse images of over two million galaxies. The KiDS team studied the distortion of light emitted from these galaxies, which bends as it passes massive clumps of dark matter during its journey to Earth. From the gravitational lensing effect, these groups turn out to contain around 30 times more dark than visible matter. Left, a group of galaxies mapped by KiDS. Right, the same area of sky, but with the invisible dark matter rendered in pink.
context_page_description: The VLT Survey Telescope is a telescope located at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. It is housed in an enclosure immediately adjacent to the four Very Large Telescope Unit Telescopes on the summit of Cerro Paranal. The VST is a wide-field survey telescope with a field of view twice as broad as the full Moon. It is the largest telescope in the world designed to exclusively survey the sky in visible light.
  The VST program is a cooperation between the Osservatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy, and the European Southern Observatory that began in 1997. The OAC is one of the institute members of Istituto Nazionale di AstroFisica, which created a separate institute for the coordination of both technological and scientific aspects of the project, named Centro VST a Napoli. VSTcen was founded and directed by Prof. Massimo Capaccioli of the VST project, and hosted at the OAC. ESO and VSTceN collaborated in the commission phase, while ESO was responsible for the civil engineering works and the dome on site. The telescope has now started observations and ESO is solely responsible for managing its operations and maintenance.
context_section_description: The primary function of the VST is to support the Very Large Telescope by providing surveys – both extensive, multi-colour imaging surveys and more specific searches for rare astronomical objects. Three started in October 2011 as part of the Public Surveys Project, and they are anticipated to take five years to carry out. These are the Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS), VST ATLAS and the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Plane (VPHAS+). They focus on a wide range of astronomical issues from searching for highly energetic quasars to understanding the nature of dark energy. More information about the surveys can be found on the ESO - The VST Surveys website.
  The data volume produced by OmegaCAM is large. About 30 terabytes of raw data will be produced per year and will flow back into data centres in Europe for processing. A novel and sophisticated software system has been developed at Groningen and Naples to handle the very large data flow. The end products from the processing will be huge lists of the objects found, as well as images, and these will be made available to astronomers worldwide for scientific analysis. Funding for the data analysis was uncertain in 2011.
caption: First Results from the KiDS Survey.[11]
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