Announcements 2018

11 June 2018: Which stars harbor what kind of planets? The NEID spectrograph, destined for Kitt Peak, will soon study planets discovered by the NASA missions Kepler and TESS. Designed for extreme radial velocity precision and funded by NASA, NEID will arrive at the WIYN telescope later this year. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was launched in April and will become fully operational this month.

5 June 2018: Project & Science News Cast your votes now for sessions at LSST 2018; voting closes tomorrow, June 6. LSST will be hosting Booth #614 at the SPIE conference in Austin June 11-15. If you’re attending the conference, please stop by. The 4th version of the LSST overview paper, “LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products,” was submitted to arXiv on May 25. Since its first submission 10 years ago, the paper has grown from 29 to 57 pages, and the author list has increased from 93 to 313. LSST is featured in a recent article in Universe Today titled, “What are the Chances that the Next Generation LSST Could Find New Planets in our Solar System?” A time-lapse video of the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) effort at the Asturfeito factory in Spain is now available in the LSST Gallery.* A Commissioning Science Validation Bootcamp took place …

4 June 2018: Astronomers recently reported the discovery of 14 new stars within 10 parsecs of the Sun. The discovery by the RECONS project was made using data obtained with the SMARTS 0.9m telescope at CTIO. Established in 1994, RECONS has discovered one of every seven systems within 10 parsecs. Are more of the Sun’s nearest neighbors yet to be discovered? Stay tuned!

31 May 2018: A new study using Gemini data reveals that the ratio of binary stars in Kepler’s K2 exoplanet host stars is similar to that found elsewhere in our neighborhood of the Milky Way. According to lead author Dr. Rachel Matson of NASA’s Ames Research Center, “While we have known that about 50% of all stars are binary, to confirm a similar ratio in exoplanet host stars helps set some important constraints on the formation of potential exoplanets seen by Kepler.” Until recently, astronomers generally focused on single exoplanet host stars, believing that planets form primarily around lone stars like our Sun. However, the research led by Matson, who’s team observed 206 star systems, demonstrates that the influence of a neighboring star does not appear to deter planet formation. The presence of a very close neighboring star produces enormous collateral effects on a planetary system, possibly ejecting planets into interstellar space, or …

23 May 2018: Project & Science News Don’t forget to register for LSST 2018 using this link. The deadline for registration is July 9. LSST was mentioned in a recent article by Ellen Meyer (UMBC) about the future of astronomy and data, originally published in The Conversation and re-printed in the San Francisco Chronicle and at Smithsonian.com. In Spain, a reception was held at the factory of LSST vendor Asturfeito on May 14 to acknowledge the significance of the work completed on the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA). Approximately 200 people attended, including local government officials and industry dignitaries. A news article describing the event can be found here. Installation of the first summit network equipment took place on Cerro Pachón at the beginning of May. After readying the summit computer room, which included ensuring the space was appropriately clean and temperature-controlled, the IT team began installing servers in this space, which will serve …

21 May 2018: To enhance U.S. scientific leadership in astronomy and astrophysics, and enable the broader U.S. community to to take advantage of the power of ground-based extremely large optical-infrared telescopes (ELTs), the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO), and the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory (TIO) have embarked on the development of a U.S. Extremely Large Telescope (US-ELT) Program.

8 May 2018: Project & Science News Registration is open for LSST 2018; register now at this link. Proposals for meeting sessions are also currently being accepted here. The deadline for submitting session topics is May 14. Several LSST subsystem staff presented status updates and recent accomplishments on May 1 at the LSST Open House for the AURA Member Representatives Meeting in Tucson, AZ. An LSST team spent 5 days in Spain last month conducting a thorough safety review of the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) at the facility of vendor Asturfeito. The group inspected the numerous safety features included in the TMA, and reviewed the procedures by which the group of vendors responsible for building the TMA (referred to as UTE) will verify that the hazard mitigations meet LSST requirements. Read more about the review in this news post. The Education and Public Outreach (EPO) subsystem held a Citizen science workshop in April …

8 May 2018: Astronomers using the Dark Energy Camera on the CTIO Blanco telescope have detected a new dwarf galaxy in the stream of gas linking the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The new galaxy, Hydrus 1, located in the “water snake” constellation, may have been brought to the Milky Way by the Magellanic Clouds.

3 May 2018: Astronomers using data from both of the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrographs (GMOS - North and South) measured the motions of stars within a sample of 32 massive elliptical cluster galaxies and found the stellar motions inconsistent with these galaxies’ solitary cousins. The galaxies chosen are known as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) because they are the brightest members of large galaxy clusters. The international team of astronomers obtained Gemini spectra to find the relative velocities of stars within each galaxy and then determine the central stellar velocity dispersions and radial dispersion profiles for each galaxy. “This is similar to what we see in our own Solar System with the different velocities of the planets around the Sun,” said John Blakeslee, Gemini Observatory's Head of Science. “We use the planets’ velocities to determine our Solar System’s mass distribution and it is also how we know the Sun’s mass accurately.” The researchers discovered a …

1 May 2018: The April 2018 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 Clockwise from upper right: a) Nicholas Mayall at the guiding eyepiece at the prime focus during commissioning of the KPNO 4-meter telescope that now bears his name; b) the Mayall 4-meter under moonlight during the MzLS imaging survey, which was completed in February 2018; c) the Mayall’s primary mirror being lifted out of its cell during an early stage of the work to prepare the telescope for installation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instru- ment (DESI). By mid-June the entire top end of the telescope will have been removed, and installation of the new prime focus system for DESI will begin. Initial commissioning with the new DESI hardware should begin in November 2018.

25 April 2018: Project & Science News Save the date! The LSST 2018 Project and Community Workshop will take place the week of August 13 in Tucson, AZ. More details will be available soon. Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of Fermilab and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, published an article about LSST on April 17 titled “The world’s largest astronomical movie,” which features detailed information and visualizations of the LSST Camera. An LSST cross-project team met at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on April 3-4 to conduct the latest in a series of Early Integration Pathfinder Activities. This activity focused on simulated control and image collection for the nominal Auxiliary Telescope visit sequence. Read more about the activity here, and view a group photo taken at the event in the LSST Gallery. LSST’s series of spring subsystem meetings concluded last week with the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Subsystem Meeting, held …

19 April 2018: While most supernovae studied to date brighten and fade over a period of weeks, a handful are known to evolve much quicker. KSN2015K reached its maximum brightness in 2 days and faded to half that in only 7 days. To explain the rapid evolution, the discovery team, which includes NOAO astronomers Alfredo Zenteno and Chris Smith, has argued that the star bumped into itself in the explosion!

11 April 2018: Gone in a (cosmological) flash: a team of astronomers found 72 very bright, but quick events in a recent survey and are still struggling to explain their origin. Miika Pursiainen of the University of Southampton will present the new results on Tuesday 3 April at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science. The scientists found the transients in data from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Programme (DES-SN). This is part of a global effort to understand dark energy, a component driving an acceleration in the expansion of the Universe. DES-SN uses a large camera on a 4-metre telescope in the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean Andes. The survey looks for supernovae, the explosion of massive stars at the end of their lives. A supernova explosion can briefly be as bright as a whole galaxy, made up of hundreds of billions of stars. Pursiainen and his collaborators …

4 April 2018: In a drama taking place in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a close companion galaxy to the Milky Way, a rare star is speeding out of the galaxy at 300,000 miles per hour. The first runaway yellow supergiant star ever discovered, and only the second evolved runaway star found in another galaxy, the star was once a member of a binary star system and was ejected at high speed when its companion star exploded as a supernova. The discovery was made using the CTIO 4-m Blanco telescope.

27 February 2018: Project & Science News An Education and Public Outreach (EPO) focus group for teachers was held in Tucson on February 3-4. Led by LSST Education Specialist Ardis Herrold, the event gathered 11 high school and college educators from across the U.S. to solicit feedback on prototypes of the online educator tools, including Jupyter Notebook-based interactive astronomy investigations, currently being developed by the EPO team. Read more about the meeting in this recent news post. The Project Office kicked off a series of spring LSST subsystem meetings on February 12 in Tucson, AZ. Subsystem managers, administrators, and other project office staff members joined LSST’s Senior Management team for a day of project updates and discussion. A group photo of the event is available in the LSST Gallery. The next subsystem meeting will be held by Telescope and Site, on February 28-March 2 in Tucson. The first column of the LSST Summit …

19 February 2018: By measuring the brightness of about a dozen stars, lingering just outside of our galaxy, a team of astronomers believe they have solved a nearby intergalactic mystery. The researchers exposed the identities of three ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidates using the Gemini South telescope. The team reports that the objects appear to be loose clusters of stars, not dwarf galaxies as some had previously believed. This finding has profound ramifications on the quantity of cold dark matter around our Milky Way and, by implication, other galaxies. Using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, an international research team led by Dr. Blair C. Conn of the Australian National University studied three ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidates, and found they were not as expected. The three ultra-faint dwarf galaxy suspects, DES1, Eridanus III, and Tucana V, located in the vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds, were studied using a …

14 February 2018: Project & Science News A meeting of AURA’s Management Council for LSST (AMCL) took place in Tucson on January 29-30. The AMCL, which meets three times a year, is AURA’s oversight and advocacy committee for LSST. AURA President Matt Mountain was present along with LSST Senior Management for a productive agenda of presentations and discussions. The AMCL will meet again April 19-20 in Washington, DC. The LSST Overview paper will be issued soon; to prepare for this, the Project Office has initiated verification of the “Builders List” in order to correctly credit and recognize the efforts of LSST team members. LSST’s Auxiliary Telescope, which has been under refurbishment at the LSST Project Office in Tucson, will soon undergo functional testing of its mechanical and electrical systems. Read more about the Auxiliary Telescope and its role in the LSST survey in this recent news post. The Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) …

31 January 2018: Project & Science News The 231st AAS Meeting concluded on January 12 in National Harbor, MD. LSST hosted a well-attended Town Hall during the meeting; slides from presentations given by Beth Willman, Federica Bianco, and Adam Bolton at the event are available here. LSST also staffed an exhibit booth (photo here) in the NSF Pavilion throughout the meeting. To alleviate persistent communications challenges with terminology LSST will no longer use the Data Management terms “Level 1,” “Level 2,” and “Level 3” for communication with the scientific community about LSST data products. Instead we will use the clearer terms “Prompt Products,” “Data Release Products,” and “User Generated Products,” respectively. This terminology is consistent with the descriptions of each of the three product types in Project documents. A selection of community-facing Project documents and webpages are being updated to reflect the change. A Provisional Acceptance Test of the washing facility will take …

18 January 2018: Project & Science News Happy New Year, and welcome back! We hope you all had a relaxing holiday break and are ready for the exciting year ahead. LSST Assembly Integration Verification (AIV) Manager Jacques Sebag submitted this spectacular drone footage of the LSST facility, taken on December 28. The video was taken after the LSST team collaborated with subcontractor Besalco to move the facility mobile roof to the flat area located on the north side of the lower enclosure. Congratulations to all for this achievement at the end of 2017! The LSST Network Engineering Team (NET) is pleased to announce the first successful transfer of digital data over LSST/AURA fiber optic networks from the Summit Site on Cerro Pachon, Chile to the Base Site in La Serena, Chile and on to the Archive Site at NCSA in Champaign. The test transmissions started on December 18 and continued through December 22. …

12 January 2018: The Core-collapse Supernova Rate Problem, or the fact that we don’t see as many core-collapse supernovae as we would expect, has a solution, thanks to research using the Gemini South telescope. The research team concludes that the majority of core collapse supernovae, exploding in luminous infrared galaxies, have previously not been found due to dust obscuration and poor spatial resolution. Core-collapse supernovae are spectacular explosions that mark the violent deaths of massive stars. An international team of astronomers, led by PhD student Erik Kool of Macquarie University in Australia, used laser guide star imaging on the Gemini South telescope to study why we don’t see as many of these core-collapse supernovae as expected. The study began in 2015 with the Supernova UNmasked By InfraRed detection (SUNBIRD) project which has shown that dust obscuration and limited spatial resolution can explain the small number of detections to date. In this, the first …