Press Releases: Gemini Observatory

14 September 2015: A team of astronomers has given us our best view yet of an exoplanet moving in its orbit around a distant star. A series of images captured between November 2013 to April 2015 shows the exoplanet β Pic b as it moves through 1 ½ years of its 22-year orbital period.

10 September 2015: Continuing Gemini Observatory’s commitment to the positive stewardship of our planet, Gemini leads in the use of renewable energy sources on Maunakea.

13 August 2015: Going beyond the discovery and imaging of a young Jupiter, astronomers using the Gemini Observatory's new Planet Imager (GPI) have probed a newly discovered world in unprecedented detail. What they found is a planet about two times the mass of Jupiter, and the most Solar System-like planet ever directly imaged around another star.

9 July 2015: NOAO scientists, using the Gemini Observatory 8-meter telescope in Chile, have obtained the highest resolution image ever obtained for the planetary nebula NGC 2346. Shaped like a butterfly, or an hourglass, but known scientifically as a bipolar planetary nebula, this object is at a distance of 2,300 light-years from our Sun in the constellation Monoceros.

15 June 2015: Using the advanced adaptive optics system GeMS, on the Gemini South telescope, astronomers have imaged a beautiful stellar jewel-box – a tightly packed cluster of stars that is one of the few places in our galaxy where astronomers think stars can actually collide.

3 March 2015: Like the lost little puppy that wanders too far from home, astronomers have found an unusually small and distant group of stars that seems oddly out of place. The cluster, made of only a handful of stars, is located far away, in the Milky Way’s “suburbs.” It is located where astronomers have never spotted such a small cluster of stars before.

6 January 2015: Stunning exoplanet images and spectra from the first year of science operations with the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) were featured today in a press conference at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington. The Gemini Planet Imager GPI is an advanced instrument designed to observe the environments close to bright stars to detect and study Jupiter-like exoplanets (planets around other stars) and see protostellar material (disk, rings) that might be lurking next to the star.

7 November 2014: Astronomers are announcing today the discovery of two unusual objects in comet-like orbits that originate in the Oort cloud but with almost no activity, giving scientists a first look at their surfaces. These results, presented today at the annual meeting of the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society in Tucson, Arizona, are particularly intriguing because the surfaces are different from what astronomers expected, and they give us clues about the movement of material in the early solar system as the planets were assembled.

16 September 2014: A University of Utah astronomer and his colleagues discovered that an ultracompact dwarf galaxy harbors a supermassive black hole – the smallest galaxy known to contain such a massive light-sucking object. The finding suggests huge black holes may be more common than previously believed.

5 August 2014: Astronomers have discovered an extremely cool object that could have a particularly diverse history—although it is now as cool as a planet, it may have spent much of its youth as hot as a star.

1 August 2014: During the middle of 2013, Jupiter’s moon Io came alive with volcanism. Now, an image from the Gemini Observatory captures what is one of the brightest volcanoes ever seen in our solar system. The image, obtained on August 29, reveals the magnitude of the eruption that was the “grand finale” in a series of eruptions on the distant moon. Io’s volcanism is caused by the tidal push-and-pull of massive Jupiter, which heats the satellite’s interior – making it our Solar System’s most volcanically active known body.

12 May 2014: An international team led by Université de Montréal researchers has discovered and photographed a new planet 155 light years from our solar system.

17 April 2014: The first Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star has been confirmed by observations with both the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory. The initial discovery, made by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, is one of a handful of smaller planets found by Kepler and verified using large ground-based telescopes. It also confirms that Earth-sized planets do exist in the habitable zone of other stars.

2 April 2014: Stellar lifetimes are measured in billions of years, so changes in their appearance rarely take place on a human timescale. Thus an opportunity to observe a star passing from one stage of life to another on a timescale of months to years is very exciting, as there are only a very few examples known. One such star is Sakurai’s Object (V4334 Sgr). First reported by a Japanese amateur astronomer in 1996 as a “nova-like object," Sakurai’s Object had been only a few years before the faint central star of a planetary nebula. In the 1990’s Sakurai’s Object brightened by a factor of 10000. This brightening has been attributed to a final helium shell flash. In this process the burned out core of the star at the center of the planetary nebula re-ignites.

6 January 2014: After nearly a decade of development, construction, and testing, the world’s most advanced instrument for directly imaging and analyzing planets around other stars is pointing skyward and collecting light from distant worlds.

26 November 2013: Gemini observations support an unexpected discovery in the galaxy Messier 101. A relatively small black hole (20-30 times the mass of our Sun) can sustain a hugely voracious appetite while consuming material in an efficient and tidy manner – something previously thought impossible. The research also affects the long quest for elusive intermediate-mass black holes. The findings are published in the November 28, 2013, issue of the journal Nature.

9 August 2013: “Celestial Pollution” from meteors like this weekend’s Perseid Meteor Shower sprinkle sodium high up in our atmosphere and give astronomers what they need to see the universe in much greater detail.

6 August 2013: Gemini Observatory’s latest instrument, a powerful infrared camera and spectrograph at Gemini South, reveals its potential in a series of striking on-sky commissioning images released today.

2 July 2013: A unique new instrument at Gemini South in Chile takes the removal of atmospheric distortions (using adaptive optics technology) to a new level. Today’s release of seven ultrasharp, large-field images from the instrument’s first science observations demonstrate its remarkable discovery potential.

27 June 2013: Gemini Observatory’s Planet-Finding Campaign finds that, around many types of stars, distant gas-giant planets are rare and prefer to cling close to their parent stars. The impact on theories of planetary formation could be significant.