Announcements 2007

17 August 2007: Deep Gemini imaging of the cluster of galaxies Hydra I (also known as Abell 1060) at a distance of 54 Mpc (176 million light-years) has revealed an abundance of massive luminous metal-rich globular clusters that appears to impersonate ultra-compact dwarf galaxies. This is the richest population of such massive stellar systems ever found in any nearby galaxy clusters. This new finding by Elizabeth M. H. Wehner and William E. Harris (McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada) indicates that these massive stellar clusters may be transition objects between Ultra-Compact Dwarf (UCDs) galaxies and the more familiar massive globular clusters. UCDs are a recently discovered type of old stellar system – too faint and compact to be called normal dwarf elliptical galaxies, but too big and bright to be called conventional globular clusters. Small numbers of them have been identified and studied in the nearby Virgo and Fornax clusters of galaxies over the past …

7 August 2007: Astronomers have combined data from the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope on Kitt Peak and NASA’s Spitzer and Chandra space telescopes to identify one of the biggest collisions of galaxies ever observed. Four large galaxies have been spotted in the process of tangling and, ultimately, merging into single gargantuan galaxy five billion light-years from Earth. Yale Press Release |Spitzer Press Release

31 July 2007: Linhua Jiang (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona) has led a United States/Germany team of astronomers in the study of some of the most distant and youngest known quasars. The six distant quasars they observed are at redshifts ranging between z = 5.8 to 6.3 and correspond to a period when the universe was only about one billion years old. Using the Gemini Near Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) at Gemini South and the Near-Infrared Imager (NIRI) at Gemini North, the team found these very young quasars to be already super-enriched in heavy elements. The quasars are also powered by extremely massive black holes. The Jiang et al. results cast a new light on the assembly of black holes and the chemical enrichment of the universe less than one billion years after the Big Bang. Quasars are the most luminous and most energetic objects in the universe. The stellar-like objects are surmised to …

17 July 2007: NOAO astronomers Chris Smith and Tom Matheson, and former scientific staff members Nicholas Suntzeff, Mark Phillips and Robert Schommer, have been awarded the prestigious Gruber Cosmology Prize as contributors to two scientific teams who simultaneously discovered the "crazy" phenomenon of the accelerating expansion of the Universe, known since by the name dark energy. For more info on the roles of NOAO staff and telescopes, see this article in the September 2006 NOAO/NSO Newsletter. Gruber Foundation Press Release

11 July 2007:

6 July 2007: The Tohono O’odham Boys & Girls Club of Sells held its annual horse camp this year at the Kitt Peak picnic grounds from June 22-24, including a star party one evening (lower right) presented by volunteers from NOAO and the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association. Three dozen kids and a dozen adults participated.

27 June 2007: During a search for hydrogen emission in the disks of young stars, Suzanne K. Ramsay Howat (UK Astronomy Technology Centre) and Jane S. Greaves (University of St. Andrews) have discovered a massive layer of hot gas around a low-mass M3-type star in the 6 million-year-old Eta Chamaeleontis cluster. Both the strength and the kinematics of the emission imply that it arises from a disk illuminated by ultraviolet radiation produced by the central star. Studying the gas content of protoplanetary disks around young stars is an important step in understanding the formation of planetary systems. Molecular hydrogen is one of the main constituents of the atmospheres of giant planets and so must be present in the disks for Jupiter-like planets to form. Moreover, the near-infrared emission from it is one of the best indicators of warm gas that may exist in gaps carved by massive new protoplanets. This emission may arise …

19 June 2007: NOAO’s educational outreach programs recently received two of nine “K-12 Student & Teacher Discovery Program” grants from Science Foundation Arizona. The Hands-On Optics program was awarded $225,000 to expand its offerings to several rural locations throughout southern Arizona. The Research Based Science Education program was awarded $125,000 to enable math/science teachers to have research experiences in astronomy and image processing, and then implement these high-tech topics in their classrooms through a new initiative called Building Information Technology Skills (BITS) Through Astronomy. Science Foundation Arizona Press Release [pdf]

18 June 2007: Amidst the stunning beauty of the Foz do Iguaçu park and waterfalls in Brazil, more than 130 astronomers and staff from the seven-country Gemini partnership converged during the week of June 11th, 2007 to discuss current results, capabilities and future research and collaborations. The Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica (LNA), acting as the Brazilian National Gemini Office, was responsible for the local organization of the meeting. Foz de Iguaçu was chosen as the meeting place because it combines a desirable tourist attraction – the Iguaçu-Falls are among the most stunning natural displays on earth – with excellent infra-structure for international conventions. “We are very satisfied that the Gemini Board accepted the offer of LNA to host the Gemini Science Meeting in Brazil,” said Albert Bruch, chair of the Local Organizing Committee. “Among several options we choose a prime meeting place which from the very beginning gave us confidence that the participating …

5 June 2007: The new NOAO-NSO Newsletter includes articles on the renewal of KPNO and CTIO as recommended by the NSF Senior Review, recent spectroscopic results from Gemini, the new ReSTAR committee on the science case for a small and mid-sized telescope system, and “Disturbing News in the Large Magellanic Cloud” [see image] from Knut Olsen and Phil Massey.

30 May 2007: The GLOBE at Night 2007 citizen-science campaign generated nearly double the number of measurements of the world’s dark (and not so dark) skies compared to its first year. The program also successfully demonstrated a prototype digital data-collection effort that aims to grow to a global scale by 2009 during the International Year of Astronomy. For more see NOAO Press Release 07-07, released this week at the AAS meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii.

25 May 2007: Deep HST and Spitzer imaging of a passively evolving galaxy identified in the Gemini Deep Deep Survey (GDDS) has led to the detection of a very compact cluster of massive red galaxies at a redshift of z =1.51. For galaxies without emission lines this redshift is beyond the reach of most spectroscopic studies, however, the ultra-deep Gemini spectroscopy of the GDDS program detected continuum emission from the source which made it possible to establish the z = 1.51 redshift of the galaxy. Assuming that the other cluster members have the same redshift makes this one of the most distant clusters discovered to date. Subsequent HST and Spitzer imaging uncovered 12 galaxies within 170 kpc of the GDDS target proving that the newly discovered cluster is both compact and densely populated. This suggests that several of the cluster members will likely merge to form a single behemoth galaxy by the present …

17 May 2007: This image of the nearby star-forming region NGC 1333 was released in honor of the retirement celebration for Stephen Strom, a two-time staff member of the U.S. national observatory who has led a multifaceted life in astronomy, public policy, and the arts. For more, see NOAO Press Release 07-06

15 May 2007: GNIRS: What Happened At the end of April, GNIRS was warmed up for routine cold head service. In the process of servicing the cold heads, the fast warm-up system and vacuum pumps were left on over the weekend; this has always been the normal operating procedure. The GNIRS fast warm-up system has been used on the order of a dozen times without incident. The system has a completely independent controller that shuts off power to the heater resistors when the temperature set point is reached. It is independent of all other Gemini and GNIRS software. For some unknown reason the controller failed, resulting in continuously heating GNIRS until it reached temperatures near 200° C for an undetermined period of time. The fast warm-up system did not have thermal fuses or circuit breakers. When Gemini staff arrived on Monday, they recognized there was a problem and shut the heaters off. They …

14 May 2007: Saturday, May 19, come to Kitt Peak, watch the sunset and then enjoy an hour of chamber music by the Tucson Jr. Strings Quartet. When the music ends and the stars have come out, attend an hour-long star party and view celestial wonders through a variety of amateur telescopes. More information on the Visitor Center’s May events page.

14 May 2007: An Australian team, led by Sarah Brough of the Swinburne University of Technology used the Gemini South Telescope to find that the most massive galaxies evolve through a variety of mechanisms which are dependent on the mass of their cluster environment. These observations are not consistent with any single model of galaxy formation, presenting a challenge for theorists. Brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) are the most massive galaxies known. They are generally red, elliptical type galaxies with remarkably similar brightnesses that are only found near the centers of galaxy clusters. To understand how galaxies form and evolve it is vitally important to understand the formation of these massive galaxies. The uniformity of BCGs suggests that they have experienced similar evolutionary histories and their position at the centers of clusters suggests that their histories must be connected to their environment. Current models of galaxy formation predict that the stars in these most …

7 May 2007: Letters of Intent to propose for the 2007 Telescope System Instrumentation Program funding cycle are due May 11, 2007. See the TSIP web site for the current Program Announcement and Proposal Solicitation.

3 May 2007: May 4 is the registration deadline for this conference in Tucson to be held from June 4-7. The interdisciplinary agenda covers technology, methods and experimental design for the detection and rapid follow-up observations of celestial transients, as well as data fusion to create knowledge about the underlying astronomical phenomena.

27 April 2007: This fresco painting-like image of the Carina Nebula was made by combining numerous images in Hydrogen-alpha light from the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope with color data from CTIO taken by Nathan Smith. For more, see The Carina Nebula: Star Birth in the Extreme

23 April 2007: Proof that certain double-star systems can erupt in full-blown explosions and then continue to flare up with smaller bursts has been spotted by the ultraviolet eyes of NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer, with help from data including narrowband images taken at Kitt Peak National Observatory. For more, see http://www.galex.caltech.edu/