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20 October 2022: A gas giant exoplanet with the density of a marshmallow has been detected in orbit around a cool red dwarf star by a suite of instruments, including the NASA-funded NEID radial-velocity instrument on the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF NOIRLab. The planet, named TOI-3757 b, is the fluffiest gas giant planet ever discovered around this type of star.

28 June 2021: Some exoplanet searches could be missing nearly half of the Earth-sized planets around other stars. New findings from a team using the international Gemini Observatory and the WIYN 3.5-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that Earth-sized worlds could be lurking undiscovered in binary star systems, hidden in the glare of their parent stars. As roughly half of all stars are in binary systems, this means that astronomers could be missing many Earth-sized worlds.

12 October 2020: NOIRLab is pleased to announce that limited science operations are being re-established at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Gemini South, and SOAR facilities in Chile after suspension on 18 March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

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.

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.

3 September 2014: Imagine living on an exoplanet with two suns. One, you orbit and the other is a very bright, nearby neighbor looming large in your sky. With this “second sun” in the sky, nightfall might be a rare event, perhaps only coming seasonally to your planet. A new study suggests that this could be far more common than we realized.

19 February 2014: The astronomical community was very excited by the appearance of a supernova in a relatively nearby galaxy in late January 2014. Observations of this supernova, located in the galaxy M 82, and referred to as SN 2014J revealed that it is a type Ia. These occur in a binary star system composed of a dense white dwarf star and a companion star, either another white dwarf or a bloated red giant star. These supernovae are especially interesting because they provide one of the best ways to measure distances to faint galaxies, and therefore calibrate the expansion of the universe. At Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), two different teams have been observing SN 2014J.

25 July 2013: The Whirlpool Galaxy (Messier 51) has been a popular night sky target for astronomers for centuries. Charles Messier first identified it in 1773 and listed it as number 51 in his catalog. To him, it looked like a faint, fuzzy object that might be a comet. William Parsons, the 3rd Earl of Rosse, used his 72-inch telescope “Leviathan” to observe the Whirlpool in 1845. Since then, Messier 51 has likely been targeted by virtually every telescope in the northern hemisphere. It is found in the constellation Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs) and is a classic example of a spiral galaxy.

4 June 2013: Using the new wide-field camera at the WIYN 3.5 meter telescope, astronomers have found that the peculiar asteroid P/2010 A2's tail is much longer than previously supposed. The tail is about a million km long, roughly three times the distance from the earth to the moon.

13 May 2013: For centuries, humans have pondered what life on other planets beyond our solar system might be like. With the launch of the Kepler Spacecraft in 2009 we now have evidence for the widespread existence of such planets. Kepler’s discovery of hundreds of planet candidates around other stars has inspired a new book that combines both science and science fiction: A Kepler’s Dozen: Thirteen Stories about Distant Worlds that Really Exist. This anthology is co-edited by David Lee Summers (author of The Pirates of Sufiro and editor of Space Pirates) and Dr. Steve Howell (Kepler Project Scientist). (Fig. 1)

4 December 2012: Just in time for the holidays, a spectacular image of the Bubble Nebula (NGC 7635) demonstrates the potential of the new camera known as the One Degree Imager, or ODI, that is being commissioned at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope on Kitt Peak. The Bubble Nebula is a shell of gas and dust carved out by the stellar wind of the massive central star (BD+60 2522), and ionized by the same star’s high-energy light. Located in the constellation Cassiopeia, this nebula is about 10 light-years across.

10 September 2012: The days when professional astronomers peered through telescopes are long gone. Today, the camera or other instrument that is attached to the telescope is as important as the telescope itself. Over the life of a telescope, new instruments are added that greatly enhance its capabilities. So the new camera known as the One Degree Imager, or ODI, that is being commissioned at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope on Kitt Peak is of great excitement to astronomers. When fully operational, the ODI camera will be able to image an area of the sky five times that of the full moon – far larger than any previous camera at the WIYN telescope. Sensitive to visible light, the camera will be able to resolve objects as small as 0.3 arc seconds – about the equivalent of seeing a baseball at a distance of 30 miles away.

30 November 2011: The NASA Kepler Mission is designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to discover Earth-size planets in or near the “habitable zone,” the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist, and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets. It now has another planet to add to its growing list. A research team led by Steve Howell, NASA Ames Research Center, has shown that one of the brightest stars in the Kepler star field has a planet with a radius only 1.6 that of the earth’s radius and a mass no greater that 10 earth masses, circling its parent star with a 2.8 day period. With such a short period, and such a bright star, the team of over 65 astronomers (that included David Silva, Ken Mighell and Mark Everett of NOAO) needed multiple telescopes on the ground to support and confirm their Kepler observations. These included the 4 meter Mayall telescope and the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The accompanying figure shows the size of the Kepler field, seen over Kitt Peak.

19 October 2011: In a paper just published in Nature, Aaron Geller (Northwestern U) and Robert Mathieu (U of Wisconsin) have shown that blue stragglers are most probably formed from mass transfer or mergers in binary systems, rather than originating from stellar collisions as has also been proposed. Observations made at the WIYN 3.5m of the old open cluster NGC 188 show that blue stragglers in long period binaries have companions with masses ~ 0.5 solar mass, with very little scatter.

21 December 2009: Astronomers have reported new observations of a remarkable binary star population in a well-known star cluster.

7 October 2008: A deep new image of the Virgo cluster has revealed monumental tendrils of ionized hydrogen gas 400,000 light-years long connecting the elliptical galaxy M86 and the disturbed spiral galaxy NGC 4438.

22 July 2008: Astronomer Pierre Martin, director of science operations at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), has been selected as the new director of the WIYN Observatory, which operates 3.5-meter and 0.9-meter telescopes on Kitt Peak.

7 January 2007: Astronomers studying highly energetic binary stars called polars have obtained the first observational evidence that the intense magnetic fields produced by the white dwarf half of the interacting pair can induce flares, sunspots and other explosive activity in its otherwise low-wattage, low-mass partner.

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.”