Announcements 2015

26 February 2015: The March 2015 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. On the Cover NOAO unveiled the first chapter of its graphic novel, “Tales of the Modern Astronomer: ANTARES Rising,” at the January 2014 American Astronomical Association (AAS) meeting to highlight the ANTARES project. The cover image for this Newsletter issue is the first panel of the graphic novel’s second chapter,“First Bytes: Dawn of the Data.” The story line for this new chapter was presented as the backdrop of the NOAO booth at the January 2015 AAS meeting. Read more starting on page 24 of this month's Newsletter.

25 February 2015: Infrared observations with the Gemini North telescope have confirmed a 12 billion solar mass black hole in an exceptionally bright quasar in the very early universe. The finding, led by a Chinese team, used Gemini, as well as telescopes from around the world, to discover and characterize an extremely massive black hole from a period when the universe was very young (about 900 million years after the Big Bang). This observation requires extremely rapid growth of the black hole. While black holes of comparable mass have been observed after they have had billions of years to gradually gain mass over cosmic history this quasar challenges astronomers to figure out how such a huge object could exist so early in the history of the universe. Abstract: So far, roughly 40 quasars with redshifts greater than z=6 have been discovered. Each quasar contains a black hole with a mass of about one …

1 February 2015: That’s the distance to GJ 1132b, a newly discovered rocky planet about 1.2 times as large as Earth that orbits a small, dim star in the constellation Vela. The planet is almost certainly too hot to support life, but it is about 90 light-years nearer to us than the next-closest known Earth-sized planets. The discovery could herald the era of probing the atmospheres of nearby small worlds for signs of life. GJ 1132b is “arguably the most important planet ever found outside the solar system,” Drake Deming, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park, writes in a review that accompanies the study in the Nov. 12 Nature. The MEarth-South Observatory, an array of eight automated, 40-centimeter telescopes in Chile, spotted the shadow of GJ 1132b as it crossed in front of its star once every 1.6 days. The researchers claim that the Hubble Space Telescope could determine …

26 January 2015: The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project has delivered major optical elements to Arizona Optical Science and L3-Brashear for figuring and polishing. Above is an image of the largest corrector lens, C1 measuring 1.15m in diameter. The homogeneity of the fused silica glass came in at an astounding 1ppm (exceeding the 3ppm spec). DESI will be conducted on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory starting in 2018.

15 January 2015: As of January 2nd, 2015, Gemini’s Fast Turnaround (FT) program is open for business. Following the first proposal deadline on January 31st, the Gemini community is now able to submit proposals every month for the duration of this open-ended trial. The intent of the FT scheme - which is initially being run as a pilot at Gemini North only - is to greatly shorten the time between having an idea and acquiring the supporting data. Proposals will be reviewed in the 14 days following each deadline, and principal investigators (PIs) will be notified of the outcome by the 21st of the month. A small support team at Gemini will work with successful PIs to quickly prepare their observations, which will then be available for execution on three dedicated nights each month for the following three months. The proposal review process differs from anything that Gemini (or, as far as we …

2 January 2015: For release at 11:00am PST on Monday, January 5, 2015 A compelling new image from Gemini Observatory peers into the heart of a group of galaxies (VV166) traveling through space together. The variety of galactic forms range from a perfect spiral, to featureless blobs and present, at a glance, a sampling of the diversity and evolution of galaxies. Galaxy groups are the most evident structures in the nearby universe. They are important laboratories for studying how galaxies form and evolve beyond our own Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way and the Great Spiral in Andromeda. Exploring the nature of these extragalactic “herds” may help to unlock the secrets to the overall structure of the universe. Herd Dynamics Unlike animal herds, which are generally the same species traveling together, most galaxies move through space in associations comprised of myriad types, shapes, and sizes. Galaxy groups differ in their …