Announcements

22 February 2002: Phoenix, a high resolution infrared spectrograph, originally built for use on the NOAO 4-m telescopes at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo, underwent commissioning on Gemini South in December 2001. The first science observing programs were performed in early February 2002. They comprised a Demonstration Science program (described below) and individual science projects from the Gemini queue. Both the commissioning and the science runs were highly successful. Introduction to Demonstration Science Our universe initially was virtually entirely hydrogen and helium, as a result of the Big Bang. The heavier elements (which astronomers call "metals") that now make up a small fraction of the universe's mass and our sun's mass (but much of the mass of the earth, and our bodies) were made inside previous generations of stars, which exploded and ejected their material into space. Studies have shown that spiral galaxies, including our Milky Way, have higher abundances of "metals" in …

20 February 2002: shows a myriad of hot blue massive stars and several famous nebulae in impressive detail in this new color image taken at the Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile by the NOAO Local Group Galaxies Survey Team.

8 January 2002: A planetary nebula produced by a star that was once like our Sun. This image was obtained with the "Abu" thermal-infrared camera built by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, and was released in honor of the dedication of Gemini South on January 18, 2002.

29 November 2001: Astronomers using the recently commissioned Gemini North telescope in Hawaii have discovered a protoplanetary disk orbiting one of the stars in a newborn quadruple star system.

25 November 2001: The blue dot in the center of this image (highlighted by a blue arrow) is the optical light signature of Gamma Ray Burst 011121. It was taken with the National Science Foundation's Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile on November 23. The reddish dot adjoining the transient gamma ray burst, at its lower left, is probably the core of the galaxy in which the gamma ray burst occurred.

1 June 1999: Observations of globular clusters teach us how the first generation of stars in our Galaxy formed some 12 to 15 billion years ago and how they have evolved ever since. Globular clusters are extremely dense stellar environments that typically contain between one hundred thousand to one million stars. The density of these star cities presents us with a wealth of information on stars of all sizes but also presents a great challenge – how can we peer into the very heart of such a dense star cluster? Gemini, with its excellent image quality, can provide extremely sharp pictures that deblur and deblend the star images and allow observations right into the very heart of these oldest stellar environments. The optical picture on the left is sharp and clear because of the good atmospheric conditions on Mauna Kea and the excellent optical quality of the Gemini telescope. Yet NGC 6934 contains …