Announcements

15 May 2014: The following text is duplicated from the Lawrence Livermore National Labratory (LLNL) press release, distributed on May 15, 2014. Also, see the Stanford University news release on this result. See the original Gemini press release for the Gemini Planet Imager's first light from January 7, 2014. Using one of the world's largest telescopes, a Lawrence Livermore team and international collaborators have tracked the orbit of a planet at least four times the size of Jupiter. The scientists were able to identify the orbit of the exoplanet, Beta Pictoris b, which sits 63 light years from our solar system, by using the Gemini Planet Imager's (GPI) next-generation, high-contrast adaptive optics (AO) system. This approach is sometimes referred to as extreme AO. The Gemini Planet Imager snapped an amazingly clear and bright image of the gas giant Beta Pictoris b after an exposure of just one minute. By using a series of …

6 May 2014: This new image of NGC 896, a region of energetic star formation in a cloud of gas and dust, represents one of the many beautiful images that Dr. Travis Rector has produced using NOAO telescope data over the years. Rector has now released a total of 150 images; more than 100 of these can be found in the NOAO image gallery. If all of Rector’s images were combined into a single image, it would contain more than five billion pixels – or 5 Gigapixels. Remarkably, this still covers only about 0.1% of the entire sky!

1 May 2014: Our solar system just got a little more crowded, thanks to discoveries from a huge digital camera designed to study dark energy. Last week astronomers reported the discovery of 2012 VP113 – nicknamed "Joe Biden" after the vice president, or VP, of the US. This potential dwarf planet was spotted on the outer fringes of the solar system, in a region called the inner Oort cloud. Days later, the same team reported two more potential dwarfs, known as 2013 FY27 and 2013 FZ27. Both of these objects are in the Kuiper belt, a grouping of relatively small bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune that is also home to Pluto and three other known dwarf planets. Astronomers suspect the Kuiper belt is littered with dwarfs, but many either reflect too little light or are too distant to have been visible in previous sky surveys. Dark eye The fresh haul of discoveries …

1 April 2014: The Cerro Tololo Ohio State Multi Object Spectrograph (COSMOS) arrived at CTIO on 2014-03-14. COSMOS was re-assembled in the Blanco Coude room by a team led by J. Elias (NOAO-N), S. Points (NOAO-S) and Mark Derwent (OSU). The COSMOS team re-installed the collimator and camera optics, slit masks, dispersers, and blocking filters. They found that the delivered image quality of COSMOS, using a pinhole mask, is the same as that which was measured in the Tucson lab prior to shipment. The photo above shows COSMOS fully assembled in the Blanco telescope coude lab. Considerable credit is due to the CTIO TelOps, ETS, and CISS staff for their support and help. More information about COSMOS can be found at http://www.noao.edu/nstc/kosmos We look forward to a successful first run on the Blanco telescope in April.

26 February 2014: The March 2014 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. This issue includes information pertaining to the 2014B Call for Proposals, which are due March 31, 2014. On the Cover NOAO is embarking on a path to better serve the community in the use and analysis of big data. The cover image is the beginning panel of "Tales of the Modern Astronomer: ANTARES Rising," which tells the story of one young researcher in the near future benefiting from such development to exploit "open access to data and real-time astronomy tools" in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Era (read the full story about ANTARES in the Science Highlights section of this Newsletter). Development is starting now to establish this expertise at NOAO on behalf of the community.

20 February 2014: Though there are now many hundreds of confirmed exoplanets known, the number of exoplanet host stars that also have stellar companions is not well known. It is important to understand such binarity (or multiplicity) because this can have a profound effect on the way in which planets form and interact with one another. It is particularly important to examine the binarity of host stars that harbor a giant planet in a highly eccentric orbit since these are more likely to have had a dramatic dynamical history where the other star may have disrupted the orbit. New research by Stephen Kane (San Francisco State University) and collaborators shows that planets on highly eccentric (very non-circular) orbits are not necessarily explained by the presence of an additional star still present in the system. The observations that lead to this conclusion used the Differential Speckle Survey Instrument (DSSI) on the Gemini North telescope …

18 February 2014: On December 27, 2013 technicians at Gemini North identified that one of the top shutter’s drive units had a critical failure with its spherical bearing system. The system, not designed for in-situ repairs, is a complex mechanism used to open and close the 22-ton shutter system via large chains, and is located within the Gemini dome shutter. To perform repairs it requires an involved process of stabilizing the shutter, releasing the drive chains, and removing the 2-ton+ drive unit. Even under ideal conditions this work would require multiple weeks of effort. Due to this premature failure of the drive’s bearing system (which keeps the drive sprockets aligned to the drive chain) it was determined that in order to protect the shutter and telescope from potential risk, a shutdown was necessary. The shutdown was turned into a high-priority project and resources were made available to repair the drive unit -- located …

14 February 2014: Nearly every "star" in this image is actually a galaxy. The SOAR Adaptive Module (SAM), built by CTIO/NOAO-S, is mounted on the SOAR 4.1 meter telescope: it creates an artificial laser guide star which enables the exquisite resolution seen here. The dark shadow on the left ( as seen in the full image) is produced by the SAM guide probe. Data were taken in September 2013 for the SAM science verification proposal by D. Caminha et al.

6 February 2014: The recent supernova explosion (named SN2014J) in the galaxy M82 is particularly exciting because this galaxy is relatively close ("only" about 12 million light years distant). This enables astronomers to independently measure the distance of this type Ia supernova, and thus calibrate the distance to other type Ia supernovae. The image shows SN2014J (arrow) in M82 as it was observed by the WIYN 3.5m telescope on January 28, a few days before reaching maximum brightness. The observation used WIYN’s newest camera, the One Degree Imager. The WIYN aperture and spatial resolution will be essential as the team follows the fading supernova during the months ahead.

7 January 2014: Visit the NOAO Booth (space 520) at the AAS Meeting this week to see Tales of the Modern Astronomer: ANTARES RISING on the booth's backdrop, or, if you can't make it to the meeting.

21 November 2013: The Kitt Peak Ohio State Multi-Object Spectrograph (KOSMOS) and the Cerro Tololo Ohio State Multi-Object Spectrograph (COSMOS) are nearly identical spectrographs being developed simultaneously. The position of the long slit of the spectrograph is shown superimposed on the image of the planetary nebula M 57.

14 November 2013: Gemini's powerful new instrument for studying planets beyond the Solar System, the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), has successfully received its first starlight for engineering and testing on the night of November 11-12. On-sky observations are currently ongoing for technical integration with the Gemini South telescope. The GPI team (geminiann13015a) began the 7-night observing run began with a head start, since preliminary pupil and pointing alignments were completed early, due to extensive preparatory work and smooth integration since the instrument arrived at Gemini South in August. “We locked the AO system on the first try with the first star we looked at. Watching the starlight smooth out on the wavefront sensor was amazing,” said GPI Principal Investigator Bruce Macintosh. “GPI is a complex instrument with many subsystems, so integration is a complicated process. For now we’re deep in engineering tests verifying interactions throughout the entire system with real starlight – getting …

7 November 2013: This image of Hartl-Dengel-Weinberger 3 (HDW 3) was obtained with the wide-field view of the Mosaic camera on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The distinctive braided shape of this large, ancient planetary nebula is the result of the planetary nebula colliding with the interstellar gas around it as the nebula moves through the galaxy.

7 October 2013: Gemini’s flagship local outreach program in Chile, Viaje al Universo, blasted off early last week when Gemini South’s Nancy Levenson addressed nearly 800 students at Colegio San Joaquin. The celebration set into motion a week of fun and educational activities for students, teachers and families from across the region of Coquimbo (including the communities of La Serena, Coquimbo and Combarbalá). During the week many hands-on activities engaged students of all ages, from pre-school to senior citizens, with talks on astronomical research done at Gemini and other Chilean observatories, teacher workshops, rocket building and launching, classroom activities and much more. Participants, from students to local community leaders joined in the fun as Gemini’s portable StarLab planetarium wowed audiences with programs on the beautiful dark Chilean skies. Local Almirante Latorre student Alondra Torres had never been inside a portable planetarium before and described it for a national TV station like this, “This …

7 October 2013: Observations using the Gemini Near-Infrared Imager (GNIRS) at the Gemini North telescope have confirmed one of the lowest mass free-floating planet known, perhaps the very lowest. The discovery team, led by the University of Hawaii’s Michael Liu, discovered this reddest known field dwarf using the Pan-STARSSS1 survey telescope on Maui’s Haleakala. The team's follow-up observations on Gemini were made over three nights in late June and early July of this year. From the Gemini (and other observations) the object, known as PSO J318.5-22, appears to have a mass only six times that of Jupiter and likely formed about 12 million years ago at a neighborly distance of about 80 light-years away. In a UH Institute for Astronomy (IfA) press release issued on October 9, 2013, Liu is quoted: "We have never before seen an object free-floating in space that looks like this. It has all the characteristics of young planets …

24 September 2013: Occultations are one of the best ways to determine the size of a Solar System object. The events occur when bodies orbiting the Sun pass between the Earth and a star, blocking out the star’s light for a brief period of time. Since astronomers know the speeds of Solar System bodies very precisely from their orbits, the time that the starlight is blocked directly tells us the size of the occulting object. In addition, an occultation can uncover information about the Solar System body’s atmosphere, if it exists. A rocky body without an atmosphere will very suddenly extinguish the starlight, while one with an atmosphere will create a "fuzzy" event with a slow dimming and eventual blocking of the starlight. For example, one of the reasons we know so much about Pluto, including that it has an atmospheric pressure about a million times lower than the Earth's, is from studies …

9 September 2013: The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), Gemini’s next-generation instrument for characterizing new worlds, has seen a frenzy of activity over the past month. In late July the instrument’s cryogenics were warmed up, the instrument’s primary components parsed into shippable pieces (geminiann13011a), and seemingly overnight the instrument arrived at Gemini South (geminiann13011b). “For the past 2.5 years GPI has called the labs at the University of California Santa Cruz home,” said Stephen Goodsell, who manages the project for Gemini. “Now, the fun begins as GPI arrives home and, before the end of this year, gets mounted on the back of the Gemini South telescope and collects light, from real planets!” However, before that can happen the instrument needs to be fully tested and integrated on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Currently, the instrument is fully assembled in the Gemini South instrument lab on Cerro Pachón in Chile (geminiann13011c). According to the …

29 August 2013: The September 2013 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. This issue includes information pertaining to the 2014A Call for Proposals, which are due September 26, 2013. On the Cover The cover image highlights an NOAO large survey program of galaxy clusters, using GMOS on Gemini-South. These clusters were initially identified by the South Pole Telescope (SPT): this spectroscopic survey will measure the growth of the largest structures in the Universe over time. The SPT surveys the cosmic microwave background for potential galaxy clusters, after which the GMOS survey determines velocity dispersion and mass of the clusters. This image shows six typical clusters: SPT significance maps on the left and color images from Magellan-II on the right (Bayliss et al, p.3)

27 August 2013: The first refereed science paper based on data from the Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS) demonstrates the effective use of young, lower mass stars to determine the age of a star cluster. The work, led by Canada’s Tim Davidge, also brings into focus how young cluster stars “leave the nest” and enter the general population of stars in our galaxy. Recent observations using the powerful new GeMS adaptive optics system at Gemini South catch stars before they settle into their “regular lives” and reveal clues into the past and future of a low-mass star cluster – in this case, Haffner 16 - in our Milky Way Galaxy. The combination of Gemini’s large 8-meter aperture, its infrared sensitivity, and the latest in adaptive optics (which corrects for the blurring effects of the Earth’s atmosphere), provide the key elements for the success of this work. The so-called “pre-main sequence” stars tend …

6 August 2013: Gemini observatory’s rapid-response allows for the detailed study of light from one of the most distant cases of a gamma-ray burst illuminating a galaxy ever observed. Thanks to Gemini’s unparalleled rapid-response capability, and ultra-sensitive nod-and-shuffle spectroscopy, radiation from a distant gamma-ray burst explosion clearly revealed a remarkable event near the edge of the observable universe. The Gemini optical (visible-light) spectrum provided critical evidence that the explosion happened in one of the most distant galaxies ever probed using the illumination provided by a gamma-ray burst (identified as GRB 130606A). This characterization is possible because the high-energy beacon of light from the GRB explosion must pass through interstellar gas within its young host galaxy (shown at left in the figure). The figure also illustrates how the light from the GRB is filtered by billions of light years of intergalactic gas that spans the space between us and the GRB (wide view, at …