Announcements 2018

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.

6 September 2018: The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr. Jennifer Lotz as the next Director of the Gemini Observatory. Dr. Lotz begins a five-year appointment as Gemini Director starting October 1, 2018. Previously, Dr. Lotz held the position of associate astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). “Jennifer will continue Gemini’s innovative trajectory in this new era of astronomy,” said Dr. Matt Mountain. “Jennifer’s experience and leadership in a wide range of observational astrophysics is a great fit for Gemini’s future.” Dr. Mountain is President of AURA which manages Gemini on behalf of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the International Gemini participants which include the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Korea. “I’m excited by the science at the twin Gemini telescopes right now and by the opportunity to help Gemini Observatory make the most of its full potential,” …

5 September 2018: Project & Science News The LSST 2018 Project and Community Workshop, which took place in Tucson August 13-17, offered opportunities for face-to-face interactions between geographically distributed LSST project team members and members of the LSST science community. Photos of the event are now available in the LSST Gallery; read more about this year’s event here. LSST was represented at AURA’s booth at the recent International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly Meeting, held in Vienna August 20-31. A photo of the booth is available in the LSST Gallery. LSST Director Steve Kahn, Project Manager Victor Krabbendam, and Systems Engineering Manager Brian Selvy traveled to Spain during the week of August 20-24. While there, the team visited Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) vendor Asturfeito to discuss the schedule and preparations for Factory Acceptance Testing of the TMA, which will begin in September (click here for a group photo). Prior to the Asturfeito visit, …

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 …

17 August 2018: Project & Science News The LSST 2018 Project and Community Workshop is currently underway in Tucson, AZ, with over 300 people registered. The meeting concludes on August 17. Please note that Summer Daylight Saving Time began in Chile on August 11, on that day clocks in Chile advanced by one hour. The Call for White Papers on LSST Cadence Optimization continues, submittals must be received by November 30, 2018. The NSF/DOE Joint Status Review for LSST took place from July 31-August 3 in Tucson, AZ. Plenary presentations and breakout sessions for all LSST subsystems were scheduled for the first four days. On the final day, the review committee issued its recommendations and congratulated the Project team on its excellent progress to date. The Coating Chamber departed Deggendorf, Germany on a covered river barge headed to Antwerp, Belgium, with a planned arrival date of August 13. It is scheduled to begin …

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.

1 August 2018: Project & Science News LSST 2018, The Project and Community Workshop is just two weeks away! The meeting agenda is available at this link. A reminder that the call for white papers for LSST cadence optimization is ongoing, and the deadline is November 30, 2018. An LSST Town Hall has been approved for the 233rd AAS Meeting, January 6-10 in Seattle, WA. The Town Hall will take place on Wednesday, January 9 from 7:30-8:30 p.m. More details, including speakers and location, will be announced as they are available. The Education and Public Outreach (EPO) team hosted a teacher focus group in Tucson on July 16-18. This was the second in a series of events to collect feedback from educators about the formal education products being developed by the EPO team. Read more about the event in this recent news post, and view photos in the LSST Gallery. The washing station, …

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.

18 July 2018: Project & Science News Registration for LSST 2018 is now closed. Approximately 320 people registered for the meeting, the highest attendance number to date. The block agenda for the meeting is available at this link. The Camera team reports a major project accomplishment: in late June, construction of the Cryostat assembly was completed at SLAC. The assembly was moved to the SLAC IR2 Cleanroom Facility, where the Cryostat pump plate was attached, and the assembly underwent early vacuum-testing. A photo of the completed Cryostat is available in the LSST Gallery. The Camera team received the last sensor to be provided by the UA Imaging Technology Laboratory (ITL) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on July 12. The second sensor vendor, which is providing the balance of sensors required by the project, has fewer than 25 sensors to complete. At BNL, assembly of science-raft tower modules (RTMs) using these sensors is moving …

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 …

9 July 2018: The millions of asteroids in the Solar System are thought to be the shattered remains of colliding planetesimals, the large rocky bodies that were the building blocks of the planets. New results suggest that most, if not all, of the known asteroids originate from only a few “common ancestors”, i.e., a small number of very large planetesimals. The study, published in Nature Astronomy, was carried out by a team that includes NOAO astronomer Dan Li.

5 July 2018: Project & Science News The LSST science community is invited to play a key role in the definition of LSST’s Observing Strategy. The LSST Project is now soliciting white papers to help plan various aspects of the survey strategy. The deadline for white paper submission is November 30, 2018. Click here for more details. The registration deadline for LSST 2018 is July 9; if you haven’t already registered, it’s time! A detailed block agenda for the meeting is now available. An LSST team recently visited the Coating Plant vendor Von Ardenne in Germany in mid-June to confirm coating functionality and to approve packaging and shipment of the Coating Plant to Chile. As a result of this successful visit, transport arrangements are underway; a vessel to transport the Coating Plant has been booked for August 22, 2018. The Washing Station, another deliverable in the Coating Plant contract, shipped on June 24 …

2 July 2018: The original 45-year-old top end of the Mayall telescope was recently removed and a new top ring placed in the dome. The ring will support new optics for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a state-of-the-art spectrometer that can measure the spectra of 5000 astronomical objects simultaneously. DESI will explore the mysterious physics of dark energy, which is believed to accelerate the expansion of the Universe.

25 June 2018: A new generation of sky surveys offers new frontiers for exploration and discovery, and NOAO’s Data Lab is ready to assist! Version 2.0 of the Data Lab’s Science Platform, released this month, features new datasets, including the 30 billion measurements in the NOAO Source Catalog. The above movie shows the developing exposure map of data in the NOAO archive and illustrates the build up of a crowd-sourced survey of the sky.

20 June 2018: Project & Science News The deadline for registration for LSST 2018 is July 9. Watch for a draft agenda for the meeting, which will be available soon. The TVSSC (Transient and Variable Stars Science Collaboration) Survey Strategy Proposal Preparation Workshop took place in Bethlehem, PA on June 4-8. The purpose of the meeting was to organize the response of the TVSSC in advance of the upcoming LSST Observing Strategy call for white papers, which is scheduled for late June. The annual SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation conference took place in Austin, TX from June 10-15. LSST was well-represented with more than 35 posters, presentations, and invited talks highlighting LSST construction progress. LSST@Europe3 wrapped up in Lyon on June 15. The meeting gathered approximately 150 participants for 5 days of talks, tours, and informal opportunities for networking between members of the LSST Project and the European science community. Recordings of many …

18 June 2018: The Mayall telescope’s new top end ring was recently installed using a 450 ton crane with a 250 foot boom. The top ring will support new optics for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a state-of-the-art spectrometer that can measure the spectra of 5000 astronomical objects simultaneously. By surveying 30 million galaxies and quasars, DESI will explore the mysterious physics of dark energy, which is believed to accelerate the expansion of the Universe.