Press Releases: Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory

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.

31 May 1999: Dr. John W. (Jack) Harvey, astronomer at the National Science Foundations National Solar Observatory (NSO) at Kitt Peak, Arizona, has been awarded the prestigious George Ellery Hale Prize by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to the field of solar astronomy over an extended period of time".

17 December 1998: The discovery of the acceleration of the universe by two teams of astronomers using the National Science Foundation's (NSF) National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) was named by the journal Science as the top scientific research advance of 1998.

21 April 1998: Two teams of astronomers searching for signs of other solar systems with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii have independently discovered a disk around a nearby star that may be forming--or may have already formed--planets.