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9 Junio 2020: Representado con el hashtag #ShutDownSTEM, el día miércoles 10 de junio de 2020 será un día de protesta internacional en el mundo de la investigación y en la academia en contra del racismo sistémico. Los organizadores del movimiento han pedido a los profesionales de STEM y de investigación que detengan por un día sus actividades normales de investigación, enseñanza y reuniones, debido el asesinato de George Floyd y otros. La idea es detener el “desarrollo normal de las actividades”, con el propósito de organizar conversaciones, aprendizajes y reflexiones sobre el racismo sistémico en la investigación y en la academia, y para crear un plan de acción para el futuro. Los detalles sobre el movimiento #ShutDownSTEM se pueden encontrar en su sitio web. En NOIRLab reconocemos la desigualdad histórica, incluyendo la baja representación de afroamericanos en la astronomía y no aprobamos ninguna forma de discriminación racial. Instamos a todo el personal ...

15 Abril 2020: Joan Najita from NSF’s NOIRLab, headquartered in Tucson, has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in astronomy & astrophysics for 2020. Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of past achievement and exceptional promise for future accomplishments. Since 1925 the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded annual Fellowships in the arts and sciences: this year they awarded 173 Fellowships, but only two in astronomy and astrophysics. From the Guggenheim webpage: “Joan has a broad range of research interests, including planets beyond the Solar System, low mass stars and brown dwarfs, the structure and origin of our galaxy, the Milky Way, massively multiplexed wide-field spectroscopy, the nature of discovery in astronomy and its science sociology and resource allocation practices. She is actively engaged in communicating science to the public and has a lifelong interest in the power of science to inspire and in the role of science in society.” We congratulate ...

30 Enero 2020: La Oficina Regional de Astronomía de América del Norte para el Desarrollo (por sus siglas en inglés, NA ROAD) ya es una realidad a partir de hoy luego de la ceremonia de firma en Ciudad del Cabo, Sudáfrica. Este hito expone la visión global de la Oficina de Astronomía para el Desarrollo (por sus siglas en inglés, OAD) a Norte América y se convierte en la onceava Oficina Regional. La OAD promueve la “Astronomía para un mundo mejor”, mediante el intercambio de recursos que promueven avance en carreras STEM (acrónimo en inglés para Ciencia, Tecnología, Ingeniería y Matemáticas), en educación y el desarrollo de la fuerza laboral a través de la inspiración que otorga la astronomía. La OAD es una oficina de la Unión Astronómica Internacional (IAU) y de la Fundación Nacional de Investigación de Sudáfrica (por sus siglas en inglés, NRF). Las Oficinas Regionales trabajan estrechamente y en forma ...

5 Septiembre 2019: The 347-person team that made the first image of a supermassive black hole has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, one of the “Oscars of Science.” By synchronizing 8 radio telescopes, the team created a virtual telescope the size of the Earth, with a resolving power never before achieved from the Earth’s surface. One of their first targets was the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87. NOAO Astronomer Tod Lauer is a member of the Event Horizon Telescope team.

22 Agosto 2019: Every galaxy has a story, and every galaxy has been many others in the past (unlike for humans, this is not purely metaphorical, as galaxies grow via hierarchical assembly). Generally speaking, the most massive galaxies have led the most interesting lives, often within teeming galactic metropolises where they are subject to frequent interactions with assorted neighbors. These interactions influence the structure and motions of the stars, gas, and dark matter that make up the galaxies. They also affect the growth of the supermassive black holes at the galaxies’ centers. Although the detailed life stories of most galaxies will remain forever uncertain, the key thematic elements may be surmised in various ways. A particularly powerful probe of a galaxy’s dynamical structure is called integral field spectroscopy (IFS), which dissects a galaxy’s light at each point within the spectrograph’s field of view. In this way, it is possible to construct a map ...

8 Agosto 2019: It all depends on how you look at it—galaxies appear different in visible light (i.e., wavelengths that our eyes are sensitive to) than at longer wavelengths, in the infrared. In visible light (panel a), the Whirlpool galaxy M51 and its companion show fine filigree dust lanes that obscure and redden the light from background stars. In the infrared (panels c and d), the dust lanes, warmed by starlight, glow brightly. Panel b combines the visible light image, taken at the Kitt Peak 2.1m telescope, and the infrared images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

5 Agosto 2019: Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io brought astronomers and geologists together to reveal that this moon’s hot spots fluctuate on unexpected timescales. The team utilized the Gemini North telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, both located on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island. The Gemini observations, which provided about 80% of the data for the study, employed the high-resolution adaptive optics system ALTAIR combined with the Gemini Near InfraRed Imager and spectrograph (NIRI). The researchers conducted a total of 271 observations between 2013 and 2018 and published their results in the July 2019 issue of The Astronomical Journal and the June 28, 2019 issue Geophysical Research Letters. While whizzing around Jupiter in an elliptical orbit with a period of only 1.8 days, Io’s interior is warmed by the varying pull of Jupiter’s gravity, roughly similar to how the Earth’s moon causes tides on our planet. This “tidal heating” powers Io’s volcanoes. However, the shape of ...

1 Agosto 2019: To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, Newsweek is highlighting pioneers in science and technology, their moonshots, and how they hope to change the world. This week’s issue features NOAO Astronomer Aaron Meisner, who describes the inspiration behind the Backyard Worlds citizen science project he helped create and how it brings the human element back to the exploration of big data sets.

25 Julio 2019: By observing a single star orbiting around the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy, a team of astronomers have tested Einstein’s one hundred-year-old theory of General Relativity in an unprecedented new regime. Unlike Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravity, which states that matter pulls on other matter across empty space, General Relativity theory proposes that massive objects like supermassive black holes distort both space and time, which in turn affects the motions of objects around them. The team’s result: “Einstein’s right, at least for now,” said Andrea Ghez at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), a co-lead author of the research. Gemini Observatory played an integral part in this research using the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea in Hawai‘i with the Near Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer (NIFS). Using NIFS the team acquired critical spectroscopic observations of the star, known as S0-2, as it orbited ...

22 Julio 2019: Maunakea Observatories issued an open letter intended to share their perspectives about the situation on Maunakea with the broader astronomy community. Read on Maunakea Observatories website

17 Julio 2019: On 2 July 2019, a total solar eclipse passed over Chile and Argentina. Through a stroke of astronomical luck, the path of totality crossed directly over the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) located in the foothills of the Andes, 7,241 feet (2200 meters) above sea level in the Coquimbo Region of northern Chile. During two minutes of totality, starting at 4:38 p.m. ET, the day turned into night when the moon completely covered the sun.

9 Julio 2019: Three new imaging surveys pave the way for an upcoming spectroscopic experiment, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which will explore the role of dark energy in the expansion history of the Universe. Images from the surveys, which were carried out with the Mayall and Bok telescopes at KPNO and the Blanco telescope at CTIO, can now be explored from the comfort of your browser for a virtual tour of the cosmos!

7 Junio 2019: The June 2019 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. It contains sections on Science Highlights, Community Science & Data, System Observing, and NOAO Operations & Staff. On the Cover First Light image (of M51) with the new DESI Corrector Assembly (CA) on the Mayall 4m telescope on Kitt Peak. The CA consists of four ~1m diameter lenses and a two-element atmospheric dispersion corrector, as well as the hexapod, used for fine-motion and focus control of the CA. The image was made with the Commissioning Instrument, composed of five CCD cameras temporarily installed in the DESI focal plane.

29 Mayo 2019: To have, or not to have dark matter? That is the question. In early 2018, a team of researchers led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University shook up the astrophysics world when they announced that the dwarf, “ultra-diffuse galaxy,” which was referred to by van Dokkum as NGC 1052-DF2, is almost devoid of dark matter. Their report, published in the journal Nature, acknowledged that this conclusion depended on the distance to the galaxy. Nevertheless, the researchers presented evidence in favor of a distance that implied the galaxy was seriously light on dark matter. The problem is that the formation of galaxies without dark matter doesn’t fit most theories of galaxy evolution. If van Dokkum and his team are correct then astrophysicists have some serious explaining to do. The original Gemini summary of the van Dokkum et al. work can be found here. The van Dokkum team has also published ...

14 Mayo 2019: The 8.4m-diameter primary mirror of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has reached its home at Cerro Pachón in Chile. Earlier this month, the mirror reached the port at Coquimbo, where it was loaded onto a 72-wheeled transport vehicle for the trip to the summit. The trip included passage through the tunnel at Puclaro Dam, with just inches to spare on either side. In a survey set to begin in 2022, LSST will scan the entire visible sky every few nights for 10 years, opening a new window on the changing Universe.

2 Mayo 2019: New results from the Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe today is expanding faster than expected, based on how the Universe appeared 13 billion years ago. Possible explanations for the discrepancy include a surprise appearance of dark energy in the young Universe (“early dark energy”) or that the Universe contains a new subatomic particle that travels close to the speed of light (“dark radiation”). The development relies on an earlier study of Cepheid variable stars carried out with the SMARTS 1.5m telescope at CTIO.

22 Abril 2019: Using an artificial intelligence algorithm to sift through massive amounts of data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a team of astronomers, led by an undergraduate at UT Austin, has discovered two new exoplanets. The planets are “super-Earths” — planets about twice the size of Earth—that orbit very close to their stars. With orbital periods of 13 days and 2.5 days, each day on these planets is a scorcher! NOAO astronomer Mark Everett is a member of the discovery team.

17 Abril 2019: The Gemini telescopes helped identify low-metallicity stars by gathering medium-resolution spectroscopic GMOS data for 666 bright stars under poor weather conditions. These data provide a unique opportunity to explore the chemical evolution of the Milky Way and look at the enrichment of star-forming gas clouds in the early Universe. Note: Below are highlights from an article published in the April 2019 issue of GeminiFocus by Principal Investigator Vinicius Placco of the University of Notre Dame. The original papers were published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astronomical Journal. Low-metallicity stars (stars with less than 1% of the elements heavier than Hydrogen and Helium than the Sun contains) are the Rosetta Stones of stellar astrophysics. Encoded in the atmosphere of these low-mass, long-lived relics are the signatures of the processes by which the first chemical elements were cooked up, perhaps as early as a few tens of millions of years after ...

10 Abril 2019: Observations made with the Event Horizon Telescope, a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes, have captured the first picture of a supermassive black hole. The black hole appears as a bright ring as it gravitationally bends the light around it into a bright ring that surrounds the black hole's dark shadow. The black hole in this portrait resides at the center of the galaxy M87, which lies at the heart of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, 55 million light years from Earth. NOAO Astronomer Tod Lauer is a member of the EHT research team, and works closely with the University of Arizona EHT group led by professors Dimitrios Psaltis and Feryal Ozel.

4 Abril 2019: On April 1, the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak emerged from hibernation—its dome reopened to the night sky, and starlight poured through the six large lenses of its powerful new research tool: the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Early next year, DESI will begin the greatest cosmic cartography experiment attempted to date, surveying 40 million galaxies and quasars out to a distance of 10 billion light years, and 10 million stars in our Galaxy. DESI's commissioning camera captured this image of the Whirlpool Galaxy, a.k.a. M51.