Announcements 2015

30 September 2015: Expecting to resolve stars deep into the crowded field of a globular cluster is a tall order for ground-based telescopes. However, Paolo Turri (University of Victoria, Canada) and colleagues have used the Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS) with the Gemini South Adaptive Optics Imager (GSAOI) to do just that. Their data present the most accurate and deepest near-infrared photometry from the ground of a crowded field. It also illustrates the remarkable potential of MCAO-equipped Extremely Large Telescopes of the future. Their Ks measurements of the Galactic globular cluster NGC 1851 are combined with HST photometry and the resulting color-magnitude diagram demonstrates that the ground-based data is of an unprecedented depth and precision for crowded field observations. The delivered image quality approaches Gemini’s diffraction limit, with an average measured full-width at half-maximum (FHWM) of 0.09 arcsecond. Abstract: The Extremely Large Telescopes currently under construction have a collecting area that is …

30 September 2015: Classify galaxies and join the quest to unravel the history of galaxy formation! The public DECaLS survey capitalizes on the wide-field imaging capability of DECam at CTIO and is led by David Schlegel (LBNL) and Arjun Dey (NOAO).

25 September 2015: Update: Earthquake In Chile Damage to LSST was minimal from last week’s earthquake, including no injuries to LSST personnel, as described in our 9/18/15 Facebook posting: https://www.facebook.com/myLSST. LSST Site Manager Eduardo Serrano has since informed us that the concrete plant has been leveled and the road to the summit is now open; the 70-ton crane is on site. Besalco's surveyors are doing a General Survey of all reference points used for construction post-earthquake, work that will take a few more days to complete. Project Office News Beth Willman visited LSST Corporation Member Institution Texas A&M this week to talk about LSST and near-field cosmology. The Project Office has taken steps to ensure that LSST can operate normally for a period of time in the event of an October 1 government shutdown and possible continuing resolution. Managers participated in a two-day training session to determine if LSST is required to obtain …

1 September 2015: The September 2015 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. On the Cover An image from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), a public survey mapping 6700 square degrees, approximately one-sixth of the sky, using the Blanco 4-m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The image shows the interacting galaxy system UGC 12589 at a distance of 470 million light-years. The distorted morphologies and diffuse light result from the gravitational interaction between the galaxies.

27 August 2015: Eight new dwarf galaxy “neighbors” of the Milky Way discovered in recent data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). More than 20 such companions to our galaxy have been discovered this year, of which 17 were found in DES data. Dwarf satellite galaxies may provide valuable clues to the nature of dark matter and how galaxies like the Milky Way formed. The Dark Energy Survey is being carried out on the 4-m Blanco telescope at CTIO.

21 August 2015: Discovered in dwarf galaxy RGG118, the petite black hole, only 50,000 times the mass of the sun, is the smallest supermassive black hole to date. NOAO Hubble Fellow Amy Reines is a coauthor on the study.

23 July 2015: An international team of astronomers from Canada and the United States recently discovered 42 new brown dwarfs using data from the near-infrared imager and spectrograph Flamingos-2 at Gemini South and other telescopes in Chile and Hawai’i. The team used Flamingos-2’s near-infrared spectroscopic capabilities to study a total of 101 targets from 2013 to 2015. The work, led by Jonathan Gagne, from the University of Montreal, confirmed signs of low-gravity for 42 of the objects with estimated masses between 8 to 75 times that of Jupiter. Further, the team identified previously unrecognized signs of low gravity for 24 known brown dwarfs. This kind of object has an important role in explaining part of the process of star formation, as current stellar formation models include the production of a non-negligible fraction of free-floating planets. Additionally, the research shows that some objects, that were thought to be brown dwarfs, were indeed much less …

1 July 2015: The 6th International Earth and Sky Photo Contest, co-hosted by NOAO and the founding institution “The World at Night”, highlights the natural beauty of the night sky and its growing battle with light pollution. The 10 winners of the 2015 contest, selected from among a 1000 entries taken in 54 countries, are shown in the contest video. The panel of judges included NOAO astronomer Connie Walker. This entry, “Above and Underneath” by Evgeny Trisko, was photographed in Pyatigorsk, in the Stavropol region of Russia. It is the fifth place winner from the “Against the Lights” category, which emphasizes the growing issue of light pollution and how it affects our view of the night sky. The panoramic view shows clouds illuminated by towns and villages hidden beneath the inversion layer.

5 June 2015: The public DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) is delivering a new dataset that will allow astronomers to probe the structure of the Milky Way, the nature of dark energy, and many other topics in astrophysics. The survey leads David Schlegel (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Arjun Dey (NOAO) recently announced the first data release from the survey. The data and catalogs can be accessed at legacysurvey.org. Dive into survey images and explore the Universe using the survey’s Sky Viewer. Future releases are anticipated at 6 month intervals. The survey capitalizes on the wide-field imaging capability of DECam at CTIO.

2 June 2015: This stunning image of the Milky Way arching over CTIO was taken from the eastern edge of the observatory, looking West (and South and North). The panorama shows the central and brightest part of the Milky Way. The bright objects on the left are the two Magellanic Clouds; the Andromeda Galaxy is visible on the right, just above the horizon. The green and red stripes in the sky are from airglow; the orange domes are from light pollution. The panorama is a composite of 9 images, taken on the night of July 31, 2014, with a Canon 6d and a Samyang 24mm lens.

27 May 2015: Using the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have discovered a young, emerging planetary system that shares remarkable similarities to our own Solar System in its infancy. GPI images reveal the disk as a bright ring of dust around a star only slightly more massive than the Sun. It is located about 360 light-years away, in a region similar to that in which the Sun was formed. The disk is not perfectly centered on the star, likely sculpted by one or more Solar System-like planets. Even more remarkable, the disk is almost exactly the same distance from its host star as, and may have a composition similar to, our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is a region of micron-sized dust to moon-sized objects like Pluto left over from the formation of our Solar System more than 4 billion years ago. “It’s like …

26 May 2015: The recipient in 1952 of the first doctoral degree in astrophysics awarded by Caltech for his work on the nature of W Virginis stars, Abt has studied many topics involving stellar spectroscopy. His work established the basic properties of B-G main sequence stars and guided subsequent developments in theories of binary star formation and the dynamics of stellar atmospheres. In the 1950’s Abt helped to select the site for a national astronomical observatory by conducting an aerial site survey and exploring potential sites by Jeep, pack horse, and on foot. From 1971-1999, Abt served as Managing Editor for the Astrophysical Journal. From 1980 onward, his interest in publication practices in astronomy led to a series of papers on topics such as the relative value of smaller aperture telescopes, the productivity of astronomers as a function of age, and the half-life of astronomical publications. Read more about Abt's scientific discoveries

1 May 2015: A University of Rochester scientist has discovered a new comet – the first to be discovered by an astronomer associated with the University of Rochester or the Rochester area in over a century, his colleagues believe. David Cameron, a visiting scientist in Eric Mamajek’s research group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, recently discovered a new short-period comet named Comet P/2015 PD229 (ISON-Cameron). Cameron discovered the comet last August while analyzing images taken in May 2015 by Mamajek with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco 4-m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. “We were looking not for comets, but objects in the outer solar system called Kuiper Belt objects, which orbit the Sun far beyond the orbit of Neptune,” said Cameron. “The former planet Pluto is the most well known Kuiper Belt object. In our images, these objects appear as little dots of light …

15 April 2015: NGC 7000 is a giant nebula in the constellation of Cygnus. Also known as the North America Nebula, this image shows only the southern tip, or the “Mexico”, part of the nebula. Emission nebula, like this one, are energized by the light from stars embedded within. The image was generated by combining data from observations in Hydrogen alpha (red), Oxygen [OIII] (green) and Sulfur [SII] (blue) filters. In this image, North is up, East is to the left.

2 April 2015: Astronomers using the Gemini South telescope in Chile have discovered striking new evidence for planet formation in a dusty disk surrounding a pair of stars in Sagittarius. The team took advantage of an offering for Early Science using the Gemini Planet Imager to study infrared light scattered off dust grains in the disk around the binary system V4046 Sgr. "The Gemini Planet Imager allows us to study nearby planet forming disks in sufficient detail that we can obtain direct-image evidence for young planets in orbits similar to those of the giant planets in our own solar system," says Valerie Rapson of the Rochester Institute of Technology, who led the research team. Indeed, the GPI imaging reveals an intriguing double ring structure around the V4046 Sgr binary that is most likely due to the formation of a giant planet (or planets) at some 4-12 times the Earth-Sun distance (approximately between Jupiter …

25 March 2015: Changes in the universe don’t often happen on human timescales. In the cosmic “blink of an eye,” astronomers have detected rapid changes in brightness and appearance of a restless stellar nursery in Orion. The luminous cloud of gas, going by the designation Re50, first appeared about half a century ago in the constellation of Orion. Now, astronomers using the Gemini South telescope, and other telescopes around the world, have discovered that the chaotic caldron has once again brightened further. According to team member Bo Reipurth, of the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, “This most recent brightening, happened, I believe in 2014, when unfortunately we weren’t able to look since Orion was in the Sun’s glare.” Reipurth adds that areas of stellar birth, in this case called a Class I protostar, are extremely dynamic places and change on human timescales, “… while we missed the initial brightening event, we can …

12 March 2015: The Orion Nebula, probably the most well-known deep sky object in the night sky, also offers rare glimpses into catastrophic episodes in the lives of stars. Widespread, high-velocity outflow points to an explosive origin of the region known as the “Orion Fingers.” With new observations using adaptive optics imaging from Gemini South, John Bally of the University of Colorado and colleagues find over 120 high-velocity outflows in this region. Direct comparisons with earlier observations reveal the motion of these fingers. Measurements of their properties, and comparison with simulations, are evidence that an explosive event drives the outflows, which may be connected to the birth of “runaway,” massive stars. Abstract: Aims. Adaptive optics images are used to test the hypothesis that the explosive BN/KL outflow from the Orion OMC1 cloud core was powered by the dynamical decay of a non-hierarchical system of massive stars. Methods. Narrow-band H2, [Fe II], and broad-band …

12 March 2015: This photo was taken in the 0.9-m control room during the last night of the REU/PIA student observing run on Feb. 13, when just by chance all of the observers on the mountain were women. The group included DES observers, the DECam community observer, and the REU and PIA students. From left to right, the people in the photo are:DECam community observer: Claudia Belardi, DES observer: Marcelle Soares-Santos, DES observer: Chihway Chang, CTIO postdoc: Catherine Kaleida, 0.9-m observer: Pia Amigo, 0.9-m observer: Sanzia Alves, CTIO PIA student: Pamela Soto, CTIO REU student: Brittany Howard The picture first appeared on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) Facebook page, and is one of the most popular DES posts on Facebook: 11.2K people reached, 1.5K post clicks, 472 likes and shares.

10 March 2015: Scientists on two continents have independently discovered a set of celestial objects that seem to belong to the rare category of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies are the smallest known galaxies, and they could hold the key to understanding dark matter and the process by which larger galaxies form. A team of researchers with the Dark Energy Survey, headquartered at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and an independent group from the University of Cambridge jointly announced their findings today. Both teams used data taken during the first year of the Dark Energy Survey, all of which is publicly available, to carry out their analysis. “The large dark matter content of Milky Way satellite galaxies makes this a significant result for both astronomy and physics,” said Alex Drlica-Wagner of Fermilab, one of the leaders of the Dark Energy Survey analysis. …

1 March 2015: The discovery was a special treat for the students, who accompanied Dr. Brad Barlow, assistant professor of astrophysics, on the trip to study several pulsating stars related to NASA’s Kepler satellite mission. For seven nights, Barlow and the students stayed awake observing and collecting data with the telescope. Despite weather that kept them from collecting data the first few nights, their hard work paid off in the form of this exciting breakthrough. “The moment of discovery was quite fulfilling for me. Everything that made possible the discovery of this new pulsating white dwarf was led by students,” says Barlow. “Alan and Eugene were the ones who moved the telescope in place, obtained a series of images over several hours, and analyzed the data with code they themselves had written.” Barlow adds that his goal in mentoring students is to equip them to make their own discoveries through research. During SuRPS …