Announcements

18 March 2016: Project News S. Jacoby traveled to La Serena, Chile last week to participate in the second annual Chile-US Astronomy Education Outreach Summit with more than 60 other representatives of astronomical and educational organizations and facilities in Chile. The Summit involved administrators, formal and informal educators from Chile and the US, university scientists, funding agencies, the US Embassy in Chile, regional government leaders, and representatives from the professional scientific observatories as well as the smaller community observatories and the astrotourism industry in Chile. Products of the summit include the construction of a network of astronomy educators, and a “roadmap document” to help guide and promote future collaboration and coordinated of astronomy EPO activities in Chile, and between its international partners. A final draft is expected sometime in May of 2016. J. Becla, interim Project Manager for Data Management (DM), reports that members of the DM team traveled to NCSA last week …

11 March 2016: Project News We have received the Status Review report from the NSF. Management is reviewing it before sending it out more broadly next week. We also received the EVMS report and as we anticipated, we have some actions but there were no critical findings. Our next status review will be in August during the All-Hands Meeting and will be a joint NSF/DOE review. There is lots of activity on Cerro Pachón – lower enclosure excavations have been approved; plates from the dome manufacturer in Italy have arrived on-site; and the TMA team from Spain will be visiting the site in Chile to start integration planning. The mirror reflective coating system contract has been signed by AURA and Von Ardenne in preparation for a kickoff meeting in April. The DM transition leadership has started site visits with the distributed team starting with SLAC and NCSA this week. Upcoming 2016 Meetings with …

4 March 2016: Projects News Minutes from the February 15th LSST Science Advisory committee phone meeting have been posted. Key topics of discussion were the plans for LSST science operations, and the current status of the Operations Simulator and metrics to determine the scientific impact of various cadence algorithms. The Data Management (DM) Leadership Team is fully engaged and working groups have been established to refine the high level designs in specific areas of DM. Additional information available on the LSST Community Forum. The construction crew on Cerro Pachón is making room for incoming hardware, including 16 sections of steel track which will sit on top of the lower enclosure pier to support the wheels that rotate the dome structure. The Camera Corner Raft was successfully evaluated at a Final Design Review earlier this week. Corporation News Congratulations to Marcel Agüeros on receipt of the Presidential Early Career Award. Marcel is an Assistant …

29 February 2016: Research shows that supermassive black holes like to be the only residents on the block, as stars too close to them end up being thrown vast distances from the galaxy's center. As black holes eject stars around them, the neighborhood becomes darker. Astronomers have been hunting for these gloomy neighborhoods in galaxy cores for decades. The signature of supermassive black holes are known as light deficits, due to the lack of stars surrounding them. Gemini Science Fellow, Juan Madrid and Carlos Donzelli from the Cordoba observatory in Argentina were granted observations through the Director's Discretionary Time, and used new Gemini data to study the brightest galaxy of the galaxy cluster Abell 85 to verify earlier observations hinting that one of the most supermassive black holes ever discovered resided at the galaxy's core. Gemini sets the record straight - in seven minutes The Gemini Multi Object Spectrograph (GMOS) at Gemini South …

26 February 2016: Projects News The 2016 LSST Joint Technical Meeting concluded on Wednesday, after bringing 150 members of the project team together for three days of lively discussion and productive work at the Chaminade in Santa Cruz, CA. The management team stayed over an extra day to discuss topics of project communication and culture, including implementation of an ombudsperson program to provide a trusted system for reporting workplace issues within the Project. The Group photo has been tweeted – check it out! The “continuous pour” on Cerro Pachón, filling the pier evacuation with concrete, finished ahead of schedule and with total success! This 31-hour non-stop effort was completed by a hard-working team on the summit with cooperation of the full moon and our astronomical neighbors, Gemini South and SOAR, which we very much appreciate! Images have been posted to our Facebook page and the LSST image gallery, which continues to be updated …

19 February 2016: Project News Changes are being made in leadership of the LSST Data Management (DM) team, a team that’s been led over the past few years by Jeff Kantor as Project Manager, Mario Juric as Project Scientist, and most recently K-T Lim as Project Engineer. Following last week’s successful NSF status review, and reflecting the desire of all involved, Jeff will be stepping aside to take on various project-wide management challenges, K-T will be relieved of his additional Project Engineer role and return to focus on being the Data Management System Architect. Mario will take over as DM lead in the interim period, assisted by LSST Project Scientist Zeljko Ivezic, temporarily assuming the core science-related DM Project Scientist duties, and Jacek Becla serving as the interim DM Project Manager. A world-wide search will be conducted to select a new DM Project Manager to replace Jeff, who has provided more than a …

18 February 2016: Astronomers use Gemini’s high-resolution multi-conjugate adaptive optics system to look for elusive companions to the lowest mass brown dwarfs. Y-type brown dwarfs, the coolest type of brown dwarfs known, provide an important link in the study of objects between stars and planets. While the fraction of binary systems associated with warmer and brighter brown dwarfs is well-established, because the Y spectral class is so new (the first Y-type brown dwarfs were only confirmed in 2011) there is little known about what fraction of Y dwarfs have companions. The Y dwarfs are generally lower in mass than the warmer brown dwarfs. For the warmer brown dwarfs, the frequency of binary systems diminishes with brown dwarf mass, and companions tend to be closer to their host and lower in mass themselves. Scientists wonder if this same trend continues for the Y dwarfs. A research team, led by Daniela Opitz (University of New …

12 February 2016: Project News The Operations Planning Review wraps up this afternoon after a productive two days exploring observatory operations and staffing with an experienced, engaged panel. The panel was charged with evaluating our framework and scope for the LSST operations plan and our (approach to, steady-state) FTE estimates. The NSF Status Review, and parallel evaluation of the LSST Earned Value Management System, completed mid-week with a positive debrief presentation from the committee. Written comments will follow with recommendations for consideration. Our Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) subcontractor Asturfeito in Spain has begun to produce steel plates for the elevation hydrostatic bearings. LSST Director Steve Kahn and Deputy Director Beth Willman are both Keynote Speakers at the Future Sky Surveys and Big Data Workshop, taking place April 25 – 29, 2016 at KASI, Daejoen, Korea. Inspection of the installation of rebar in preparation for the pier foundation concrete pour on Cerro Pachón is …

11 February 2016: Ripples in the fabric of spacetime produced by two merging black holes were detected by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO; top inset). The announcement comes 100 years after Albert Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves and signals the opening of the gravitational wave Universe. The wide-field imaging capability of DECam at CTIO (bottom inset) was used to search for the optical counterpart of the gravitational wave event.

10 February 2016: An extremely red planetary-mass object is confirmed, based on Gemini observations, to be a free-floating member of the Beta Pictoris moving group. This is one of only a handful of directly imaged planets available for spectroscopy – allowing scientists to probe the world’s physical characteristics. The team, led by K. Allers of Bucknell University (US), used the Gemini Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (GNIRS) on the Gemini North telescope to obtain spectra of the object and determine its radial and rotational velocities. These data provide the key to confirming that PSO J318.5-22 is a member of the Beta Pictoris moving group at the 99.7% level. Estimates of the mass of such objects are extremely sensitive to age, so confirmation of the group membership yields a more reliable mass: 8.3 ± 0.5 times the mass of Jupiter, with an effective temperature of about 1130 K. The Gemini spectra reveal that the body rotates at …

5 February 2016: Project News Project team members from all subsystems have uploaded materials and practiced presentations in preparation for the NSF Status Review and Internal Operations Planning review taking place sequentially in Tucson next week. Project Science Team discussed requirements for advance observing schedule publication and was debriefed on a recent workshop about systematic effects at UC Davis. Various proposals to improve information flow between the Project and Science Collaborations were also discussed, as well as the agenda for open PST face-to-face meeting at the upcoming Joint Technical Meeting in Santa Cruz. Data Management (DM) is working on updating the project-wide IT Security Plan and closing out the Winter 16 software release, including cleaning up documentation for both developers and end users. The DM sizing model, used to evaluate engineering tradeoffs and estimate costs, has also had its technology basis updated and shows no major deviations. DM is actively investigating the overlaps …

4 February 2016: The Mosaic-3 camera, mounted on the 4-m Mayall, is on a two-year mission to image the sky in preparation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. Now equipped with cutting-edge, red-sensitive charge-coupled devices (CCDs, top inset image) and new mechanical components (including the focal plate; bottom inset image), Mosaic-3 is the product of a small collaboration of scientists and engineers at Berkeley Lab, Yale University, and NOAO.

1 February 2016: Science Verification data from the Dark Energy Survey now publicly available. Covering only 3% of the full survey area, these data were used to create the largest dark matter mass map to date. The survey is being carried out with Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at CTIO (pictured).

29 January 2016: Project News Several members of the Telescope & Site team are in Madrid, Spain, completing a successful Final Design Review of the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) with prime contractor Empresarios Agrupados. In anticipation of proceeding into full fabrication, the Asturfeito facility in the Aviles Port region of northern Spain is preparing 10-meter granite pylons to be used for testing purposes. Project team members from all subsystems are preparing for two reviews taking place the week of February 8th. The NSF Status Review will assess the current status of the project and evaluate plans for the future, with emphasis on the next year of construction. The purpose of the Internal Operations Planning review is for the LSST Operations Planning Team (LOPT) to receive a thorough evaluation of our initial operations concepts and (steady-state) FTE estimates, with a focus on LSST’s operational functions and activities. The first science grade production sensor for …

27 January 2016: Images of NGC 5195, the companion to M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, show slender arcs of cool hydrogen-emitting gas (red in inset image) that border two giant arcs of hot X-ray emitting gas observed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue in inset). The arcs formed when hot gas expelled from the black hole swept up cooler gas from the center of the galaxy. The H-alpha image (red in inset) was taken with the Kitt Peak National Observatory 0.9-meter telescope.

25 January 2016: Research will change what we know about supernova explosions. The scientists detected a brightness prior to the breakout that was not predicted in the models. A new paper in the journal Nature Astronomy, The delay of shock breakout due to circumstellar material evident in most Type II Supernovae, written by a group of researchers from the Center for Mathematical Modeling (CMM) and the Department of Astronomy of the University of Chile, Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS) and international institutions, sheds new light on supernova explosions. The group discovered that supernovae generated from red supergiants, stars of great size in advanced stages of their lives, present a flash before the main explosion not predicted by current models. The discovery was made by scanning the sky using DECam for 14 nights at the 4-m Victor Blanco Telescope located at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo - part of the AURA Observatory in …

22 January 2016: Project News S. Kahn, V. Krabbendam, and B. Willman are *not* traveling to Washington, DC, as planned for the January 22nd meeting of the AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) due to severe weather. Instead the meeting will be held via videoconferencing. The AMCL provides financial oversight and advocacy for the management of LSST. Several members of the Telescope & Site team head to Madrid, Spain next week for a Final Design Review of the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) with prime contractor Empresarios Agrupados. On Cerro Pachón, Besalco management honored its employees for completing the first year of LSST construction activities on the summit with no serious injuries or job-site accidents. The first production sensor was received by the Camera team in December and is undergoing testing at SLAC. Successful completion of this analysis is a Level 2 milestone, tracked at the DOE agency level. Personnel Notes The Project Office …

21 January 2016: Base Facility Operations (BFO) are now fully implemented for the Gemini North telescope. All operations are now routinely conducted each night from the Hilo Base Facility. The implementation of BFO at Gemini North is the culmination of several years of work by most of Gemini's staff. This includes significant infrastructure improvements at the telescope and base facilities, software upgrades, staff training, and changes at all levels of operations. The result is a milestone that has revolutionized the way Gemini operates and acquires data. Observing crews at Gemini North have been testing the BFO mode since September of 2015. The night crews report that observing is much more efficient in this mode, and the science staff were thrilled to see the system go live from Hilo as our standard operations model. Gemini's Director Markus Kissler-Patig adds that in addition to this being a first for an 8-10 meter-class telescope, Gemini is …

15 January 2016: Project News With our first Weekly News Digest of 2016 we link to our holiday card, and point out that only the tree was added with PhotoShop - everything else is real! Additional construction images are being added weekly to the LSST Image Gallery; others appear on Facebook, accessible directly or from the LSST News Page. LSST had a strong presence at AAS227, with a well-attended Town Hall, a table at the Career Fair, active participation in the LSST-supported Hack Day, and an exhibit in the NSF pavilion showing our updated video. Project Scientist Zeljko Ivezic’s talk on the LSST Observing Cadence has been archived in Zenodo and made available through the online Image Gallery and Publications links on lsst.org. Operations planning is proceeding rapidly, with a review of operations functions to take place Feb 11-12, 2016 in Tucson. The review panel is: Bob Blum (NOAO), Adam Bolton (NOAO), Brenna …

14 January 2016: Seven months after it was first spotted, a puzzle still hangs over the origin of the brightest supernova ever seen. The exploding star, which was found in June 2015 and blazed brighter than 570 billion Suns at its peak, is one of a class of 'superluminous' supernovae. More than 100 times brighter and 1000 times rarer than ordinary supernovae, they have been spotted thanks to a growing number of automated telescope surveys devoted to spotting ephemeral stellar events over wide patches of sky (see 'The brightest supernovae'). Full details of last year’s explosion, known as ASASSN-15lh, were reported on 15 January in Science1. “It challenges all our previous theories of explosion mechanisms and power sources of superluminous supernovae,” says Subo Dong, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in Beijing, whose team discovered the event. Obscure origins As Dong had noted in a report …