We describe the public ESO near-IR variability survey (VVV) scanning the Milky Way bulge and an adjacent section of the mid-plane where star formation activity is high. The survey will take 1929 h of observations with the 4-m VISTA telescope during 5 years (2010-2014), covering ˜109 point sources across an area of 520 deg2, including 33 known globular clusters and ˜350 open clusters. The final product will be a deep near-IR atlas in five passbands (0.9-2.5 μm) and a catalogue of more than 106 variable point sources. Unlike single-epoch surveys that, in most cases, only produce 2-D maps, the VVV variable star survey will enable the construction of a 3-D map of the surveyed region using well-understood distance indicators such as RR Lyrae stars, and Cepheids. It will yield important information on the ages of the populations. The observations will be combined with data from MACHO, OGLE, EROS, VST, Spitzer, HST, Chandra, INTEGRAL, WISE, Fermi LAT, XMM-Newton, GAIA and ALMA for a complete understanding of the variable sources in the inner Milky Way. This public survey will provide data available to the whole community and therefore will enable further studies of the history of the Milky Way, its globular cluster evolution, and the population census of the Galactic Bulge and center, as well as the investigations of the star forming regions in the disk. The combined variable star catalogues will have important implications for theoretical investigations of pulsation properties of stars

We present optical and infrared spectroscopy of the Ðrst 2 months of evolution of the Type II supernova SN 1999em. We combine these data with high-quality optical/infrared photometry beginning only 3 days after shock breakout, in order to study the performance of the "" expanding photosphere method ÏÏ (EPM) in the determination of distances. With this purpose, we develop a technique to measure accurate photospheric velocities by cross-correlating observed and model spectra. The application of this technique to SN 1999em shows that we can reach an average uncertainty of 11% in velocity from an individual spectrum. Our analysis shows that EPM is quite robust to the e †ects of dust. In particular, the distances derived from the V I Ðlters change by only 7% when the adopted visual extinction in the host galaxy is varied by 0.45 mag. The superb time sampling of the BV IZJHK light curves of SN 1999em permits us to study the internal consistency of EPM and test the dilution factors computed from atmosphere models for Type II plateau supernovae. We Ðnd that, in the Ðrst week since explosion, the EPM distances are up to 50% lower than the average, possibly because of the presence of circumstellar material. Over the following 65 days, on the other hand, our tests lend strong credence to the atmosphere models, and conÐrm previous claims that EPM can produce consistent distances without having to craft speciÐc models to each supernova. This is particularly true for the V I Ðlters, which yield dis- tances with an internal consistency of 4%. From the whole set of BV IZJHK photometry, we obtain an average distance of 7.5^0.5 Mpc, where the quoted uncertainty (7%) is a conservative estimate of the internal precision of the method obtained from the analysis of the Ðrst 70 days of the supernova evolution.

Context. The new VISual and Infrared Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) has started operations. Over its first five years it will be collecting data for six public surveys, one of which is the near-infrared Y JK s VISTA survey of the Magellanic Clouds system (VMC). This survey comprises the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the Small Magellanic Cloud, the Magellanic Bridge connecting the two galaxies and two fields in the Magellanic Stream. Aims. This paper provides an overview of the VMC survey strategy and presents first science results. The main goals of the VMC survey are the determination of the spatially-resolved star-formation history and the three-dimensional structure of the Magellanic system. The VMC survey is therefore designed to reach stars as faint as the oldest main sequence turn-off point and to constrain the mean magnitude of pulsating variables such as RR Lyrae stars and Cepheids. This paper focuses on observations of VMC fields in the LMC obtained between November 2009 and March 2010. These observations correspond to a completeness of 7% of the planned LMC fields. Methods. The VMC data are comprised of multi-epoch observations which are executed following specific time constraints. The data were reduced using the VISTA Data Flow System pipeline with source catalogues, including astrometric and photometric corrections, produced and made available via the VISTA Science Archive. The VMC data will be released to the astronomical community following the European Southern Observatory's Public Survey policy. The analysis of the data shows that the sensitivity in each wave band agrees with expectations. Uncertainties and completeness of the data are also derived. Results. The first science results, aimed at assessing the scientific quality of the VMC data, include an overview of the distribution of stars in colour-magnitude and colour-colour diagrams, the detection of planetary nebulae and stellar clusters, and the K s band light-curves of variable stars. Conclusions. The VMC survey represents a tremendous improvement, in spatial resolution and sensitivity, on previous panoramic observations of the Magellanic system in the near-infrared, providing a powerful complement to deep observations at other wavelengths.

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We derive the star formation history (SFH) for several regions of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), using deep near-infrared data from the VISTA near-infrared Y JK s survey of the Magellanic system (VMC). The regions include three almost-complete 1.4 deg 2 tiles located ∼3.5• away from the LMC centre in distinct directions. They are split into 21.0 × 21.5 (0.12 deg 2 ) subregions, and each of these is analysed independently. To this dataset, we add two 11.3 × 11.3 (0.036 deg 2 ) subregions selected based on their small and uniform extinction inside the 30 Doradus tile. The SFH is derived from the simultaneous reconstruction of two different colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs), using the minimization code StarFISH together with a database of "partial models" representing the CMDs of LMC populations of various ages and metallicities, plus a partial model for the CMD of the Milky Way foreground. The distance modulus (m− M) 0 and extinction A V is varied within intervals ∼0.2 and ∼0.5 mag wide, respectively, within which we identify the best-fitting star formation rate SFR(t) as a function of lookback time t, age-metallicity relation (AMR), (m− M) 0 and A V . Our results demonstrate that VMC data, due to the combination of depth and little sensitivity to differential reddening, allow the derivation of the space-resolved SFH of the LMC with unprecedented quality compared to previous wide-area surveys. In particular, the data clearly reveal the presence of peaks in the SFR(t) at ages log(t/yr) 9.3 and 9.7, which appear in most of the subregions. The most recent SFR(t) is found to vary greatly from subregion to subregion, with the general trend of being more intense in the innermost LMC, except for the tile next to the N11 complex. In the bar region, the SFR(t) seems remarkably constant over the time interval from log(t/yr) 8.4 to 9.7. The AMRs, instead, turn out to be remarkably similar across the LMC. Thanks to the accuracy in determining the distance modulus for every subregion -with typical errors of just ∼0.03 mag -we make a first attempt to derive a spatial model of the LMC disk. The fields studied so far are fit extremely well by a single disk of inclination i = 26.2 ± 2.0• , position angle of the line of nodes θ 0 = 129.1 ± 13.0• , and distance modulus of (m− M) 0 = 18.470 ± 0.006 mag (random errors only) up to the LMC centre. We show that once the (m− M) 0 values or each subregion are assumed to be identical to those derived from this best-fitting plane, systematic errors in the SFR(t) and AMR are reduced by a factor of about two.