Announcements 2019

9 July 2019: Three new imaging surveys pave the way for an upcoming spectroscopic experiment, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which will explore the role of dark energy in the expansion history of the Universe. Images from the surveys, which were carried out with the Mayall and Bok telescopes at KPNO and the Blanco telescope at CTIO, can now be explored from the comfort of your browser for a virtual tour of the cosmos!

25 June 2019: Project & Science News We are aware of the proposal by the United States House Science Committee to rename LSST the Vera Rubin Survey Telescope. Dr. Vera C. Rubin made significant contributions to astronomy and the advancement of women in science, and we appreciate the Committee’s recognition of her work. AURA, which has a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation to construct and operate LSST, is continuing its ongoing dialog with the agency regarding formal designations for the facility which include any direction from Congress. Just a few days remain to take advantage of early registration pricing for LSST 2019, which ends June 30th. Click here for a link to registration and to view the first draft of the meeting agenda. The LSST Commissioning Camera (ComCam) arrived at the LSST Project Office in Tucson on June 20th, after being shipped from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, where it was constructed. …

11 June 2019: Project & Science News LSST released a statement regarding increased deployment of satellite constellations, click here to read it. The statement is based on initial analysis, specifics are still being looked into by the Project and Science Collaborations. Early registration discount pricing for LSST 2019 ends June 30th. Click here for a link to registration and to see the block schedule for the meeting. Following the successful Final Acceptance Test results for the Coating Chamber in late May, the LSST Project approved receipt of the Coating Plant (which includes the Coating Chamber and the Washing Station) from vendor Von Ardenne. Now that this milestone has been achieved, preparations can begin for coating the LSST Secondary Mirror (M2) with silver in mid-July. The LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) cell, mirror support hardware, and the M1M3 surrogate were loaded aboard a ship named the BBC Newcastle in the port of Houston, TX, and …

7 June 2019: The June 2019 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 First Light image (of M51) with the new DESI Corrector Assembly (CA) on the Mayall 4m telescope on Kitt Peak. The CA consists of four ~1m diameter lenses and a two-element atmospheric dispersion corrector, as well as the hexapod, used for fine-motion and focus control of the CA. The image was made with the Commissioning Instrument, composed of five CCD cameras temporarily installed in the DESI focal plane.

29 May 2019: To have, or not to have dark matter? That is the question. In early 2018, a team of researchers led by Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University shook up the astrophysics world when they announced that the dwarf, “ultra-diffuse galaxy,” which was referred to by van Dokkum as NGC 1052-DF2, is almost devoid of dark matter. Their report, published in the journal Nature, acknowledged that this conclusion depended on the distance to the galaxy. Nevertheless, the researchers presented evidence in favor of a distance that implied the galaxy was seriously light on dark matter. The problem is that the formation of galaxies without dark matter doesn’t fit most theories of galaxy evolution. If van Dokkum and his team are correct then astrophysicists have some serious explaining to do. The original Gemini summary of the van Dokkum et al. work can be found here. The van Dokkum team has also published …

29 May 2019: Project & Science News LSST's U.S. public funding agencies, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), have reached a final decision on the way data rights and data access will be handled during LSST Operations. More information is available on the LSST website. Don’t forget to register for the LSST 2019 Project and Community Workshop, August 12-16th at the Hilton El Conquistador in Tucson, AZ. Early bird pricing is available until June 30th; register at this link. After several months of joint efforts between the IT and Software teams in Chile, the dome and shutter at the Auxiliary Telescope were remotely controlled for the first time on May 16th. A video of the milestone is available at this link. The IT team in Chile has completed work on the installation of the LSST Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) system at the base and summit, and …

14 May 2019: Project & Science News Mirror, Mirror on the Mountain—the LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) has arrived at the LSST summit facility building on Cerro Pachón! The ship carrying the M1M3 docked in Coquimbo on May 7th, after which the mirror container was transferred to a 72-wheeled transport vehicle. Over the next few nights it traveled towards the summit, reaching its destination on May 11. More details and a link to photos of the move are available at this link. Registration is now open for the LSST 2019 Project and Community Workshop, which will take place August 12-16th at the Hilton El Conquistador in Tucson, AZ. Early bird pricing is available until June 30th; register at this link. Tomorrow, May 15th, is the deadline to submit Letters of Intent (LOIs) for community brokers who will receive LSST alerts, add scientific value, and redistribute them to the scientific community. The original call for …

14 May 2019: The 8.4m-diameter primary mirror of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has reached its home at Cerro Pachón in Chile. Earlier this month, the mirror reached the port at Coquimbo, where it was loaded onto a 72-wheeled transport vehicle for the trip to the summit. The trip included passage through the tunnel at Puclaro Dam, with just inches to spare on either side. In a survey set to begin in 2022, LSST will scan the entire visible sky every few nights for 10 years, opening a new window on the changing Universe.

2 May 2019: New results from the Hubble Space Telescope confirm that the Universe today is expanding faster than expected, based on how the Universe appeared 13 billion years ago. Possible explanations for the discrepancy include a surprise appearance of dark energy in the young Universe (“early dark energy”) or that the Universe contains a new subatomic particle that travels close to the speed of light (“dark radiation”). The development relies on an earlier study of Cepheid variable stars carried out with the SMARTS 1.5m telescope at CTIO.

23 April 2019: Project & Science News Please mark your calendars: The LSST 2019 Project and Community Workshop will take place August 12-16 at the Hilton El Conquistador in Tucson, AZ. More details will be provided as they are available. The LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3), aboard the BBC Manitoba, is rapidly making its way south to Chile. The ship passed through the Panama Canal on April 15, and after a few stops at ports along the way, it is scheduled to arrive in Coquimbo, Chile, in May. See the ship’s most recent location at this link. The M1M3 cell will soon be following the mirror to Chile; it was wrapped for shipping at vendor CAID Industries in Tucson last week and then loaded onto the 120-foot-long vehicle that will transport it to Houston, Texas. Photos of the cell being loaded on April 18th are available in the LSST Gallery. The final test campaign …

22 April 2019: Using an artificial intelligence algorithm to sift through massive amounts of data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a team of astronomers, led by an undergraduate at UT Austin, has discovered two new exoplanets. The planets are “super-Earths” — planets about twice the size of Earth—that orbit very close to their stars. With orbital periods of 13 days and 2.5 days, each day on these planets is a scorcher! NOAO astronomer Mark Everett is a member of the discovery team.

17 April 2019: The Gemini telescopes helped identify low-metallicity stars by gathering medium-resolution spectroscopic GMOS data for 666 bright stars under poor weather conditions. These data provide a unique opportunity to explore the chemical evolution of the Milky Way and look at the enrichment of star-forming gas clouds in the early Universe. Low-metalicity stars (stars with less than 1% of the elements heavier than Hydrogen and Helium than the Sun contains) are the Rosetta Stones of stellar astrophysics. Encoded in the atmosphere of these low-mass, long-lived relics are the signatures of the processes by which the first chemical elements were cooked up, perhaps as early as a few tens of millions of years after the Big Bang. These stars are believed to be the direct descendants of the first stars to be born in the Universe, which were massive and short-lived. Hence, second-generation, low-metallicity stars are the artifacts which help us write the …

10 April 2019: Observations made with the Event Horizon Telescope, a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes, have captured the first picture of a supermassive black hole. The black hole appears as a bright ring as it gravitationally bends the light around it into a bright ring that surrounds the black hole's dark shadow. The black hole in this portrait resides at the center of the galaxy M87, which lies at the heart of the Virgo cluster of galaxies, 55 million light years from Earth. NOAO Astronomer Tod Lauer is a member of the EHT research team, and works closely with the University of Arizona EHT group led by professors Dimitrios Psaltis and Feryal Ozel.

9 April 2019: Project & Science News The M1M3 has set sail for Chile! The BBC Manitoba, carrying the LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror along with some other LSST cargo, left Houston for Chile on April 5th. The trip is expected to take 4-5 weeks—you can follow the vessel’s progress by entering its name in the search bar on this website. Photos of the mirror being loaded onto the ship are available in the LSST Gallery. A reminder: Letters of Intent (LOIs) for teams who plan to propose a community broker are due by May 15, 2019. Community brokers will receive the full LSST alert stream, add scientific value, and provide science users the ability to identify targets of interest and trigger follow-up observations. A month after the LOI deadline, on June 19-21, an invitation-only technical workshop in Seattle, WA, will bring together LSST Project personnel, representatives of the LSST Science Collaborations, and proposers of …

4 April 2019: On April 1, the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak emerged from hibernation—its dome reopened to the night sky, and starlight poured through the six large lenses of its powerful new research tool: the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Early next year, DESI will begin the greatest cosmic cartography experiment attempted to date, surveying 40 million galaxies and quasars out to a distance of 10 billion light years, and 10 million stars in our Galaxy. DESI's commissioning camera captured this image of the Whirlpool Galaxy, a.k.a. M51.

26 March 2019: Project & Science News The updated LSST overview paper, “LSST: From Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products” was published in the March 11, 2019 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. The paper can be accessed at this link. Over the last few months, the LSST Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) has been carefully examining and considering the submitted White Papers on LSST Cadence Optimization, as have Project members. While the SAC is still deliberating and looking into a few specific questions, its report should be available and made public in April. The LSST Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) arrived successfully in Houston, Texas, on March 21st after leaving the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab in Tucson, Arizona, on March 15th. The mirror is scheduled to ship to Chile from the Port of Houston within a few days, and will take approximately five weeks to reach Coquimbo. Details about the mirror’s departure …

20 March 2019: How do you create the largest 3D map of the Universe? You need to study 10s of millions of galaxies! To accomplish that Herculean task, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is being installed on the Kitt Peak Mayall telescope, will use an array of robot fiber-positioners that will automatically swivel into position to capture the spectra of 5000 galaxies at a time. This video describes how scientists working at Berkeley Lab are assembling the array of robots and their related electronics.

12 March 2019: Project & Science News A Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) broker workshop took place in Berkeley, CA on February 21 and 22. DESC members met with representatives from the major community alert brokers operating on precursor surveys, to determine whether their envisioned offerings would be suitable for DESC’s needs. DESC’s response to the LSST call for broker Letters of Intent was also discussed. The workshop featured presentations by two LSST Data Management team members; Melissa Graham gave a summary of Prompt Processing and Data Products, and Eric Bellm described the selection of community alert brokers and differences between the LSST and Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) alert streams. Meeting talks are available at this link. Version 17.0 of the LSST Science Pipelines is now available. The latest release from the LSST Data Management team features many improvements, including faster installation times for many users. More information including installation instructions, release notes, …

6 March 2019: Currently under construction at Cerro Pachon in Chile, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is at the vanguard of the next generation of wide-field surveys of the sky. Capable of imaging a huge swath of sky at one go — 40 times the angular size of the full moon — LSST will survey the entire night sky every two weeks. This visualization, featured in the documentary Seeing the Beginning of Time, gives us a virtual peek inside the LSST enclosure.

27 February 2019: Project & Science News As recently announced in the document "Plans and Policies for LSST Alert Distribution," the selection of community alert brokers to receive the full LSST alert stream begins with a call for Letters of Intent (LOI). The call for Letters of Intent and a submission template are now available at this link. Individuals at any institution worldwide are invited to submit four-page LOIs. For full consideration, LOIs should be submitted by May 15, 2019. Submission of an LOI is required in order to be invited to submit a full proposal. If you have questions, email lsst-community-brokers@lists.lsst.org. The Kavli foundation has sponsored a series of AURA-organized workshops on the theme Petabytes to Science, the second of which was held February 12-14, 2019 in Las Vegas, NV. The aim of this workshop was to discuss important trends and technologies for data intensive astronomy, especially with LSST and WFIRST, and …