Announcement: Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory

9 June 2020: #ShutDownSTEM, Wednesday 10 June 2020, is a day of international protest of systemic racism in research and academia. STEM and research professionals are asked to stop their normal activities of research, teaching and meetings for one day, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and others. The organizers call for a halt to “business as usual” to accommodate conversations, learning and reflection on systemic racism in research and academia and to create a plan of action for the future. Details about the #ShutDownSTEM movement can be found on their website. We at NOIRLab acknowledge historical inequality, including the underrepresentation of African Americans in astronomy and we do not condone any form of racial discrimination. We have encouraged all staff to consider participating in learning and discussion about diversity, equity, and inclusion on 10 June. Staff may desire to be actively engaged, or to use the day for personal …

1 June 2020: A project started ten years ago by NSF’s NOIRLab Director Patrick McCarthy, then an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and fellow Carnegie scientist Daniel Kelson, has come to fruition this month with the results of theCarnegie-Spitzer-IMACS (CSI) Redshift Survey being published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The Universe is filled with galaxies like the one we live in, the Milky Way. Spread out across the sky, their distribution is not random — galaxies are instead laid out in patterns, groupings, and correlations known as large-scale structure. The goal of the CSI Redshift Survey was to understand how this structure affects the growth and evolution of galaxies. To study this, the team needed to collect many data points, including distances, luminosities, colors and — most importantly — mass, for half a million galaxies. Back in 2003, before embarking on this survey, McCarthy was involved in …

20 November 2019: In early November, the GEMMA (Gemini in the Era of Multi-Messenger Astronomy) project brought together science communications professionals to explore the unique opportunities and challenges of communicating Multi-Messenger and Time-Domain Astronomy, two rapidly growing fields in astronomy. Funded by the US National Science Foundation, this communications summit hosted more than 30 participants for two days at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, an AURA-managed facility. Until the mid-20th century, our view of the Universe was limited almost entirely to the narrow band of light that could penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere and was visible either to our eyes or to sensitive photographic plates loaded at the focus of increasingly large telescopes. The first major expansion of our view came with the development of radio astronomy, leading to the realization that the Universe could look very different when seen through different “eyes” tuned to a different type of radiation. …