Press Releases: Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory

9 January 2006: The glowing gas of the interstellar medium (ISM) is the breeding ground for the formation of new stars, and the cemetery where the ashes of dead stars ultimately return.

21 December 2005: A team of astronomers has found faint visible echoes of three ancient supernovae by detecting their centuries-old light as it is reflected by clouds of interstellar gas hundreds of light-years removed from the original explosions.

6 December 2005: More than half of the largest galaxies in the nearby universe have collided and merged with another galaxy in the past two billion years, according to a new study using hundreds of images from two of the deepest sky surveys ever conducted.

12 September 2005: Fulfilling one of its central operational goals in a big way, the SOuthern Astrophysical Research Telescope (SOAR) on Cerro Pachón in Chile made the first observations of the glowing remains of the most distant explosion ever seen in the Universe. The international telescope then provided the first accurate measurement of just how incredibly far away this explosion appears to be.

30 August 2005: A comprehensive survey of more than 4,000 elliptical and lenticular galaxies in 93 nearby galaxy clusters has found a curious case of galactic “downsizing.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

11 January 2001: A sharply detailed image of the northwest portion of the Andromeda galaxy, M31, demonstrates the power of an on-going sky survey project sponsored by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

8 January 2001: The National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Deep Wide-Field Survey marks its first release of data today with a large, exhibit-sized image of 300,000 faint galaxies and stars at the opening of the 197th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

30 March 2000: Astronomers from the National Science Foundation's National Solar Observatory are announcing in today's issue of Science that their discovery of periodically varying gas motions below the solar surface provides an important clue toward solving the biggest secret of the Sun - the origin of the 11-year cycle of solar activity.

13 January 2000: Astronomers, high school teachers and their students have discovered 73 novae in the Andromeda galaxy through a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded education program called "The Use of Astronomy in Research Based Science Education" (RBSE). These results will be presented today by Dr. Travis A. Rector and George H. Jacoby of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), in Tucson, AZ, to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta, GA. Novae are stellar outbursts that lead to a rapid brightening when mass is transferred between two stars in a binary system, causing the surface layers of one star to ignite explosively from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei.