Announcements 2018

17 December 2018: Extremely high-resolution speckle observations by Gemini South deliver critical details on a star (or stars) lying in the apparent path of remnants from the early formation of our Solar System. In early March of 2017 the outer Solar System object Orcus, and its one known satellite Vanth, were on an apparent collision course with a star – at least that’s the way it appeared from our perspective on Earth. Original calculations showed that Orcus would pass in front of a relatively bright star and temporarily block the star’s light. However, later refinements to the calculations revealed that the shadow of Vanth would trace a path across the Earth’s surface. These events, known as occultations, are only visible from a thin swath on Earth’s surface and calculations have small uncertainties due to observations of the orbits and estimates of the objects’ size. But even with these uncertainties, what happened surprised astronomers. ...

15 December 2018: Gemini Observatory announces the opportunity for new Large and Long Programs, with observations beginning in the 2019B semester. Letters of Intent to propose a new Large and Long Program are due February 4, 2019. Completed Proposals are due April 1, 2019.

14 December 2018: Astronomers have announced the discovery of the most distant body ever observed in our Solar System. Nicknamed “Farout” for its extremely distant location, the new dwarf planet 2018 VG18 is 120 times further from the Sun than Earth (i.e., at 120 AU). In comparison, the dwarf planet Eris is at 96 AU and Pluto is currently at 34 AU. The discovery was made by astronomers Scott Sheppard, David Tholen, and Chad Trujillo as part of a survey of the outer Solar System carried out in part with observing time made available through NOAO.

3 December 2018: Work on the camera for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), bound for Cerro Pachon in Chile, recently reached a major milestone with the completion of the camera’s refrigeration system (a.k.a. its cryostat). Equipped with 3.2 gigapixels, the camera is the largest ever built for ground-based astronomy. NOAO is a founding partner of LSST and is developing tools and systems to support community research with LSST.

20 November 2018: Astronomers have discovered a large, extremely diffuse galaxy companion to the Milky Way. As big as the Large Magellanic Cloud but 10,000 times fainter, the galaxy has eluded us until now because of its faint, “ghostly” appearance and its hiding place behind the disk of the Milky Way. The discovery was made with the Gaia satellite and archival data from DECam on the CTIO Blanco telescope. Astronomers want to know: is this galaxy an oddball?...or one of many “ghostly” companions yet to be found? Long press or hover your mouse over the image above to view a labeled version.

13 November 2018: Pluto’s terrain shows a “washboard” pattern of fine ridges just north of its great frozen nitrogen sea, Sputnik Planitia. A recent study by the New Horizons team argues that the ridges are deposits of water ice left behind as an ancient frozen nitrogen glacier that once covered the area sublimed away. Water-ice is buoyant in nitrogen ice and is expected to collect in pits formed on the surface of the glacier as the nitrogen sublimes. NOAO Astronomer Tod Lauer is a coauthor on the study.

30 October 2018: Astronomers have discovered that the tiny Sextans dwarf galaxy, which is 100,000 times less massive than the Milky Way, is undergoing a merger with an even smaller companion galaxy. While large galaxies like the Milky Way are thought to form through mergers with smaller galaxies, the new result illustrates how even the smallest galaxies may form that way. The discovery was made with data from the 4-m Blanco Telescope at CTIO.

22 October 2018: Discovered in part with DECam at CTIO, a new dwarf planet patrols the outer Solar System on a highly elongated orbit: it travels within 65 AU of the Sun at closest approach and as far away as 1000 AU. With its distant orbit, the small planet (300 kilometers in diameter) is sensitive to the dynamics at the edge of the Solar System — and the presence of more massive outer Solar System planets, such as the hypothetical Planet X.

16 October 2018: Thanks to two allocations of Director’s Discretionary Time and a successful Fast-Turnaround program, an international team (including Gemini Emeritus Astronomer Tom Geballe, who wrote this summary on behalf of the team) used Gemini North/GNIRS to follow the evolution of the near-infrared spectrum of the core-collapse supernova 2017eaw (ccSN 2017eaw) over three semesters. The data obtained from this relatively nearby event may help us to better understand the existence of dusty galaxies in the early, much more distant Universe. One of the unexpected discoveries in studies of the very early Universe is that many high redshift galaxies are “dusty.” These dusty galaxies exist as recently as several hundred million to a billion years after the Big Bang. The origin of this dust is somewhat of a mystery, because stars with masses similar to the Sun, which constitute the vast majority of stars in a galaxy, would not have evolved to the ...

15 October 2018: NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a “hot Earth” in orbit around a star 45 light years away. The planet, which is only 30% larger than Earth, orbits very close to its star, with a period of just 11 hours. The discovery was confirmed using multiple facilities including the CHIRON spectrograph on the SMARTS 1.5m telescope at CTIO.

19 September 2018: Multi-conjugate adaptive optics technology at Gemini South reveals that young galaxies, with large amounts of star formation, and actively growing central black holes, were relatively compact in the early Universe. A team of astronomers led by Dr. Mark Lacy (National Radio Astronomy Observatory, USA) used advanced adaptive optics on the Gemini South telescope in Chile to obtain high-resolution near-infrared images of three fields from the Spitzer Extragalactic Representative Volume Survey (SERVS). Their sample includes several ultra-luminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) which the Herschel Space Observatory found to be undergoing large bursts of star formation within the first few billion years of the Big Bang. Such galaxies have hundreds of times the infrared luminosity of a normal galaxy such as the Milky Way. The high-resolution GeMS images reveal that the ULIRGs have messy, irregular structures indicating that they are the product of recent galactic interactions and mergers. Lacy explains, “The fact that ...

11 September 2018: The slideshow above highlights images from the Legacy Surveys’ Data Release 7 (DR7), which covers more than a quarter of the sky. More DR7 images of galaxies in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies are available online.

3 September 2018: A research team has discovered that supernovae generated by red supergiants are often preceded by a bright flash, created when expanding gas from the supernova collides with a dense stellar wind launched by the star just before it explodes. To make their discovery, the team studied stars at the time of explosion, by scanning the skies rapidly for 14 nights using DECam on the NSF’s CTIO Blanco telescope. The result has been published in Nature Astronomy.

27 August 2018: Using the Gemini North telescope in Hawai`i, an international team of astronomers from Brazil, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK has discovered the most distant radio galaxy to date, at 12.5 billion light years, when the Universe was just 7% of its current age. The team used spectroscopic data from the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS-N) to measure a redshift of z = 5.72 for the radio galaxy identified as TGSS J1530+1049. This is the largest redshift of any known radio galaxy. The redshift of a galaxy tells astronomers its distance because galaxies at greater distances move away from us at higher speeds, and this motion causes the galaxy's light to shift farther into the red. Because light has a finite speed and takes time to reach us, more distant galaxies are also seen at earlier times in the history of the Universe. The study was led by graduate students Aayush ...

13 August 2018: Speckle imaging observations made at the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak have been used, in combination with data from other facilities, to confirm the existence of 44 exoplanets. Four of the planets have orbital periods shorter than a day. Sixteen have sizes within twice that of the Earth. The graphic illustrates the planetary sizes and surface temperatures and compares their orbital radii to that of Mercury. The discoveries were made by a team that includes NOAO astronomer Mark Everett. The observations were acquired under the NN-EXPLORE program, a joint program of the NSF and NASA for the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets.

30 July 2018: Observations made with DECam on the CTIO Blanco Telescope have led to the discovery of 12 additional moons of Jupiter, including its smallest known moon, Valetudo, less than one kilometer in diameter. Jupiter is now known to have 79 moons, a staggeringly large number compared to Earth’s single moon. In addition to its small size, Valetudo is also unusual because it orbits out of the plane of the other moons. Click the image to view a video of these newly discovered moons’ orbits.

23 July 2018: Light from a flashlight is dispersed into a spectrum by one of the spectrographs that will be integrated into the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at the 4-m Mayall telescope. Designed to acquire spectra of 5000 astronomical objects simultaneously, DESI will be equipped with ten three-armed spectrographs. DESI will explore the mysterious physics of dark energy, which is believed to accelerate the expansion of the Universe.

17 July 2018: Scientists announced the discovery of 12 new moons orbiting the planet Jupiter, including one that bucks the trend by orbiting in the opposite direction from others of its ilk. Gemini observations confirmed this jovian oddball, dubbed Valetudo, after the great-granddaughter of the god Jupiter. The Gemini director’s discretionary observations were made using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on the Gemini North telescope atop of Hawaii’s Maunakea. Read more about this discovery in the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) press release that follows. Scientists using National Science Foundation Observatories find 12 new moons of Jupiter Sometimes you find something you weren’t even looking for. A team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Scott S. Sheppard, during a search to find very distant Solar System objects, just announced the discovery of twelve new moons orbiting Jupiter. The moons were first found in the spring of 2017 when the team was ...

16 July 2018: Nine billion light years away, the blue supergiant Icarus is the most distant star ever seen. In 2016 it briefly flared to 2000 times its original brightness as its light was magnified fortuitously by the gravity of a passing star in a foreground galaxy. The result, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, was carried out by an international team of astronomers that includes NOAO astronomer Tom Matheson.

9 July 2018: The frustrating search for intermediate mass black holes is advancing thanks to Gemini observations of a “belch” which escaped when a black hole devoured a star. The black hole powering the blast weighed in at a few tens of thousand solar masses and is quite possibly a missing link between supermassive and stellar mass black holes. After 10 years of searching, an international team of astronomers used Gemini South, and space-based telescopes, to probe a luminous X-ray outburst unlike any seen before. The outburst was unusual because it appears to be the result of a “tidal disruption event” (TDE), in which a massive black hole slurps up an entire star, but this particular event did not occur within the center of a galaxy, where the most massive black holes reside. In their investigation, the researchers measured the mass of the black hole that powered the outburst and found it was ...