Press Releases: Kitt Peak National Observatory

3 April 2020: NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, which in 2019 brought together NSF’s optical and infrared nighttime astronomy under one entity, will now go by the shortened name of NSF’s NOIRLab (no-wah-lab), abbreviated from its longer formal name. NOIRLab is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona and operates Kitt Peak National Observatory, the international Gemini Observatory, the Community Science and Data Center, Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, and the operations of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

20 February 2020: The latest image from the international Gemini Observatory showcases the striking planetary nebula CVMP 1. This object is the result of the death throes of a giant star and is a glorious but relatively short-lived astronomical spectacle. As the progenitor star of this planetary nebula slowly cools, this celestial hourglass will run out of time and will slowly fade from view over many thousands of years.

11 February 2020: Few sights are more romantic than a star-filled sky, but there are fewer and fewer places on Earth where we can still enjoy a truly dark, star-filled sky. Light pollution means we risk losing one of the most romantic spectacles in nature, so this Valentine’s Day astronomers are asking the public to help show their love for the stars by making light pollution observations as part of the Globe at Night program.

8 January 2020: The new NEID instrument, now installed at the 3.5-meter WIYN Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Southern Arizona, USA, has made its first observations. The NSF-NASA funded instrument is designed to measure the motion of nearby stars with extreme precision — roughly three times better than the previous generation of state-of-the-art instruments — allowing us to detect, determine the mass of, and characterize exoplanets as small as Earth.

5 January 2020: Astronomers using the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, have identified several overlapping bubbles of hydrogen gas ionized by the stars in early galaxies, a mere 680 million years after the Big Bang. This is the earliest direct evidence from the period when the first generation of stars formed and began reionizing the hydrogen gas that permeated the Universe.

28 October 2019: A new instrument on the 4-m Mayall telescope has opened its array of thousands of fiber-optic “eyes” to the cosmos and successfully captured the light from distant galaxies. The milestone marks the beginning of final testing for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which is poised to begin creating the most detailed map of the Universe ever undertaken. The Mayall telescope is located at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), which is operated by the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab). DESI is supported by the Department of Energy, NSF and others.

2 October 2019: Astronomers have uncovered two historic events in which the Andromeda Galaxy underwent major changes to its structure. The findings shed light not only on the evolution and formation of the Andromeda Galaxy, but to our own Milky Way Galaxy as well. Two of the facilities in NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, Kitt Peak National Observatory and the International Gemini Observatory, played critical roles in the research, now published in the latest issue of the journal Nature.

1 October 2019: On 1 October 2019, the nighttime astronomy facilities supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) transitioned to operating as one organization, NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory. The new organization operates five scientific programs: Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the Community Science and Data Center, Kitt Peak National Observatory (all formerly known as the National Optical Astronomy Observatory); Gemini Observatory and the upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, and is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.

30 September 2019: Vice President of the Giant Magellan Telescope project and Astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Patrick McCarthy, has been selected as the new Director of the National Science Foundation National Optical-infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab).

24 July 2019: Observations made with a new instrument developed for use at the 2.1-meter (84-inch) telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Kitt Peak National Observatory have led to the discovery of the fastest eclipsing white dwarf binary yet known. Clocking in with an orbital period of only 6.91 minutes, the rapidly orbiting stars are expected to be one of the strongest sources of gravitational waves detectable with LISA, the future space-based gravitational wave detector.

19 February 2019: The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project re-launches this week, with a call to volunteer citizen scientists to join the search for cold worlds near the Sun. With its newly revamped online interface and equipped with twice as much data as before, the project offers new opportunities to discover planets lurking yet unseen in the outer reaches of the Solar System (e.g., Planet 9, Planet X) as well as cold nearby “failed stars” (a.k.a. brown dwarfs). The re-launch coincides with the publication of the project’s latest discovery: a record-setting white dwarf star encircled by mysterious dusty rings that challenge astronomers to rethink the long-term evolution of planetary systems.

25 September 2018: A new $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been awarded to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) for the development of a new “Windows on the Universe Center for Astronomy Outreach” at NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory. Located in the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope facility, an iconic structure that was once the world’s largest solar observatory, the center will provide the public with a new way to experience the cutting-edge research being carried out at Kitt Peak and NSF’s other astronomy facilities around the globe, including ground-based optical, radio, solar, and gravitational wave facilities.

12 February 2018: A new chapter opens today in the history of the 4-m Mayall telescope, the largest aperture telescope at NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). Having completed its first 45-year-long assignment, the telescope is now poised to embark on a new mission: creating the largest 3-dimensional map of the cosmos to date. The map will help astronomers chart out the role of dark energy in the expansion history of the Universe.

15 November 2017: The visit of the interstellar interloper 1I/2017 U1, recently spotted streaking through the Solar System, gives the people of Earth their first chance to study up close an object from another planetary system. In a study carried out with the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands, astronomers find that despite its foreign origins, U1 is familiar in appearance — its size, rotation, and color are similar to that of asteroids in our Solar System. Its familiar appearance supports the long-held view that our Solar System once ejected its own flotilla of such messengers out into interstellar space.

5 June 2017: A close look at the center of a nearby galaxy has revealed a surprising connection between the galaxy and the supermassive black hole at its center. The galaxy is an extreme example of an “obscured AGN”, an accreting supermassive black hole that is deeply enshrouded in gas and dust.

25 May 2016: Astronomers have uncovered evidence for a vast collection of young galaxies 12 billion light years away. The newly discovered “proto-cluster” of galaxies, observed when the universe was only 1.7 billion years old (12% of its present age), is one of the most massive structures known at that distance. The discovery, made using telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, has been reported in the Astrophysical Journal.

11 November 2015: A new book will give readers a behind-the-scenes look at how spectacular images of space are made by the world’s largest and most powerful telescopes. The telescopes and images of National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and Gemini Observatory are showcased in this book by long-time observer Dr. Travis Rector.

12 October 2015: A team led by the California Institute of Technology has been selected to transform the venerable 2.1 meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory into the first dedicated adaptive optics (AO) observatory for astronomy. This system, named Robo-AO KP, will allow astronomers to study, at high angular resolution, large numbers of astronomical objects, spanning science from planetary to stellar, and exoplanetary to extragalactic.

21 September 2015: The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), destined for the 4-meter Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), will chart out the role of dark energy in the expansion history of the universe. The US Department of Energy has announced its approval of Critical Decision 2 (CD-2) for the DESI project, authorizing its scientific scope, schedule, and funding profile. The Mayall telescope is operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

9 February 2015: Kitt Peak National Observatory is the future home of a state-of-the-art instrument that will be used to detect and characterize other worlds. The new instrument, an extreme precision radial velocity spectrometer, will measure the subtle motion of stars produced by their orbiting planets. The spectrometer, funded by NASA, will be deployed on an existing telescope at Kitt Peak, the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope. The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), which is funded by NSF, is a partner in the telescope and operates Kitt Peak.