Press Releases: NOAO

26 November 2002: The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., has entered into a new cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation for AURA to continue to operate the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and the National Solar Observatory (NSO) through September 30, 2007.

15 October 2002: An unobtrusive arc of blue stars stretching above the iconic galaxy Centaurus A represents the lingering signature of an episode of galactic cannibalism that is surprisingly recent and, astronomically speaking, quite nearby.

10 October 2002: All U.S. astronomers will gain competitive access to the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes starting early next year via an innovative new National Science Foundation program administered by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

26 September 2002: The violent beauty of solar storms and their potentially serious effects on Earth’s environment and its economy are the central themes of the Space Weather Center, a major traveling exhibit that will make its debut at the Kitt Peak Visitor Center with a ribbon-cutting reception on Tuesday, October 8, at 5:30 p.m.

6 September 2002: Direct measurements of the surface properties and interior structures of asteroids and comets should be fundamental elements of future spacecraft missions to these primitive solar system bodies, according to participants in a scientific workshop held in Arlington, VA, from September 3-6.

21 August 2002: Students from Yale University used the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory to capture a series of still images of asteroid 2002 NY40 on August 15-16, two nights before its close flyby of Earth.

10 June 2002: Due to the extremely high fire danger and the possibility of dry lightning strikes, Kitt Peak National Observatory is closing public access to its grounds and the Kitt Peak Visitor Center at 2 p.m. daily instead of the normal 4 p.m. The time change will have an impact on the last guided tour of the day, which will start 30 minutes earlier than normal. The public picnic grounds have already been closed to visitors until further notice.

3 June 2002: Aided by the distorted shape of the stars in normally faint binary systems called Soft X-ray Transients, an astronomer at the University of California-San Diego has determined that two nearby black holes each have a mass no larger than a handful of stars like our Sun.

3 June 2002: New observations of the richly populated star cluster NGC 2420 taken by the refurbished WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that the cluster contains a multitude of clues about the history and evolution of the Milky Way.

10 January 2002: A new color image of the nearby irregular galaxy NGC 6822 shows a myriad of hot blue massive stars and several famous nebulae in impressive detail.

7 January 2002: 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. The dusty disk, about three times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun, appears nearly edge-on when viewed from Earth.

30 December 2001:

13 December 2001: Astronomer Robert A. Schommer, one of the leading members of the scientific staff at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and the director of the U.S. Gemini Program, died in Chile on December 12.

28 August 2001: Astronomers have discovered a double star system, known as a massive X-ray binary, with an orbit so elongated that the twosome appears to have barely survived the disruptive effects of the supernova that transformed them into a fountain of X-ray energy.

14 August 2001: Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Blanco Telescope in Chile have used the distorting effects of a weak gravitational lens to discover and locate a dim cluster of at least 15 galaxies at a significant distance from Earth, using only the mass properties of the cluster, not its visible light.

2 July 2001: Astronomers from Lowell Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory have discovered an icy planetary body orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt roughly equal in size to Pluto’s moon Charon.

4 June 2001: From massive young star clusters swaddled in a dust cocoon 600 trillion miles wide to intriguing structural details in a circumstellar disk around a nearby binary star system, the 8-meter Gemini North telescope is providing astronomers with some of their best-ever infrared views of the processes of star and planet formation.

26 April 2001: Infrared astronomy pioneer Dr. Fred Gillett died Sunday, April 22, 2001 at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle at the age of 64, following a months-long battle with a rare bone marrow disorder.

19 March 2001: A consortium led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University and Yale University has been selected to assume operational responsibility for the historic 0.9-meter (36-inch) telescope at the National Science Foundation's Kitt Peak National Observatory.

28 February 2001: Using an off-the-shelf camera set for a long exposure and satellite data freely available on the Internet, solar scientist Bill Livingston has developed a dependable method for taking pictures of commercial communications satellites hovering high above Earth.