Press Releases: NOAO

21 May 2004: Combining images from orbiting and ground-based telescopes, an international team of astronomers has located the eye of a cosmic hurricane: the source of the 1 million mile-per-hour winds that shower intergalactic space from the galaxy M82.

22 January 2004: A duo of Chinese and American astronomers have discovered a young star in the fierce environs of the Rosette Nebula that is ejecting a complex jet of material riddled with knots and bow shocks.

8 January 2004: Near the end of its lifetime, a star like the Sun ejects its outer layers into space, producing a hazy cloud of material called a planetary nebula. The complex shapes and dazzling colors of planetary nebulae make them some of the most popular objects in the night sky, for both amateur observing and scientific study.

5 January 2004: Where can you find the best advice on the most engaging astronomy-related books and teaching materials in Spanish?

14 November 2003: Dr. Alistair Walker has been confirmed by the AURA Observatories Council as the new director of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in La Serena, Chile.

12 November 2003: The naked-eye Pleiades star cluster has long been known to professional and amateur astronomers for the striking visible nebulosity that envelopes the cluster’s brightest stars, scattering their light like fog around a streetlamp.

6 October 2003: This image of the clouds of gas and dust next to the “neck” and “body” of the Pelican Nebula was taken by the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ.

30 September 2003: The Optical Society of America (OSA) and The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), along with key industry partners, Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), were awarded today a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to implement a national middle school science education program: Hands-On Optics: Making an Impact with Light (HOO).

16 September 2003: Case Western Reserve University astronomers have announced the discovery of a new galaxy, termed Andromeda VIII. The new galaxy is so widespread and transparent that astronomers did not suspect its existence until they mapped the velocity of stars thought to belong to the well-known and nearby large Andromeda spiral galaxy and found them to move independently of Andromeda.

6 August 2003: Astronomers have finally identified the progenitor star system of a Type Ia supernova. The culprit that triggered the stellar explosion is a surprisingly normal star just a few times more massive than the Sun.

9 July 2003: Astronomers have assembled the first effective model for both the shape and evolutionary history of the Owl Nebula, the well-known planetary nebula in the constellation Ursa Major.

25 June 2003: The University of Arizona and National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) will bring top scientists and world-class telescope facilities to the NASA-funded search for life on other planets, strengthening the “astro“ part of the U.S. space agency’s astrobiology program.

26 May 2003: An international team of astronomers has discovered seven extremely large circumstellar disks silhouetted against the forming stars that they surround. These new disks are 10 to 100 times larger than both our solar system and other planet-forming disks that have been imaged previously, suggesting that it may be possible for planets to form at much larger distances from their stars than previously thought.

10 May 2003: In one of the largest and most detailed celestial images ever made, the coil-shaped Helix Nebula is being unveiled today in celebration of Astronomy Day. The resulting composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp NASA Hubble Space Telescope images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. The image shows a fine web of filamentary “bicycle-spoke” features embedded in the colorful red and blue gas ring, which is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth.

24 April 2003: Four major research organizations have joined forces to build a world-class telescope that will survey the entire sky in a relentless search for supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, near-Earth asteroids and the mysterious energy of expansion in the Universe known as dark energy.

5 March 2003: A team of astronomers headed by Frank Winkler of Middlebury College has combined precise digital observations with simple mathematics to estimate the apparent brightness of an exploding star whose light reached Earth nearly a thousand years ago, when it produced a display that was probably the brightest stellar event witnessed in recorded human history.

4 February 2003: NASA should be assigned to lead a new research program to better determine the population and physical diversity of near-Earth objects that may collide with our planet, down to a size of 200 meters, according to the final report of a workshop on the scientific requirements for the mitigation of hazardous comets and asteroids.

13 January 2003: A team of astronomers led by Matthew Holman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and JJ Kavelaars (National Research Council of Canada) has discovered three previously unknown moons of Neptune. This boosts the number of known satellites of the gas giant to eleven. These moons are the first to be discovered orbiting Neptune since the Voyager II flyby in 1989, and the first discovered from a ground-based telescope since 1949.

8 January 2003: Astronomers have discovered a small body orbiting the Sun at the distance of Neptune whose orbit makes it the first known member of a long-sought population of objects known as Neptune Trojans.

8 January 2003: Astronomers have discovered dozens of potential stellar cocoons within the hostile environment of the Carina Nebula, including some oddballs with bulbous heads, irregular shapes and long, thin tails. Each of these objects may harbor disks of gas and dust that could one day form planetary systems.