Press Releases 2019

19 December 2019: Galaxies lead a graceful existence on cosmic timescales. Over millions of years, they can engage in elaborate dances that produce some of Nature’s most exquisite and striking grand designs. Few are as captivating as the galactic duo known as NGC 5394/5, sometimes nicknamed the Heron Galaxy. This image, obtained by the Gemini Observatory of NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, captures a snapshot of this compelling interacting pair.

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).

26 September 2019: The discovery of the most distant large-scale cluster of galaxies in the very young Universe has astronomers puzzling over how it formed so rapidly.

13 September 2019: The first-ever comet from beyond our Solar System has been successfully imaged by the Gemini Observatory in multiple colors. The image of the newly discovered object, denoted C/2019 Q4(Borisov), was obtained on the night of 9-10 September using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph on the Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii’s Maunakea.

29 August 2019: In an unprecedented feat, an American research team discovered hidden secrets of an elusive exoplanet using a powerful new instrument at the 8-meter Gemini North telescope on Maunakea in Hawai‘i. The findings not only classify a Jupiter-sized exoplanet in a close binary star system, but also conclusively demonstrate, for the first time, which star the planet orbits.

15 August 2019: A renegade star exploding in a distant galaxy has forced astronomers to set aside decades of research and focus on a new breed of supernova that can utterly annihilate its parent star — leaving no remnant behind. The signature event, something astronomers had never witnessed before, may represent the way in which the most massive stars in the Universe, including the first stars, die.

14 August 2019: Supernovae, neutron star mergers, black holes at the center of galaxies, erupting young stars — these are all examples of objects in the night sky that change their brightness over time. In the coming years, astronomers expect to discover millions of these variable astronomical events with new sensitive telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). But to characterize these objects and to understand them better, they need to be observed with other, different telescopes soon after they are discovered.

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.

27 June 2019: Gemini Observatory provides critical observations that confirm the distance to a mysterious, very short-lived, radio outburst from a galaxy billions of light years away.

11 June 2019: Based on preliminary results from a new Gemini Observatory survey of 531 stars with the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), it appears more and more likely that large planets and brown dwarfs have very different roots.

6 June 2019: An international team of researchers led by astronomer Jong-Hak Woo obtained deep spectroscopy from Gemini, combined with light echo measurements from multiple observatories, to confirm a black hole “missing link.”

4 June 2019: On July 2, 2019 a total solar eclipse will pass over Chile and Argentina, and through a stroke of astronomical luck, the path of totality crosses directly over the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory located in the foothills of the Andes, 7,241 feet (2200 meters) above sea level in the Coquimbo Region of northern Chile. Five science teams chosen by NSF’s National Solar Observatory will perform experiments at Cerro Tololo during the eclipse; four of them will have their equipment trained on the Sun’s elusive corona and one will study eclipse effects on the Earth itself.

29 May 2019: On 2 July 2019 a total solar eclipse will sweep across the South Pacific Ocean before blocking out the Sun along a narrow swath of Chile and Argentina. This eclipse will pass directly over the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. During the brief two-minute window of totality when the Moon completely covers the Sun, a team of astronomers from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and students from the University of La Serena will be attempting to detect the minute deflection of starlight caused by the Sun’s gravitational field, and recreate an experiment originally done 100 years ago that made Albert Einstein a household name.

20 May 2019: Astronomers using the Gemini Observatory explore Neptune’s largest moon Triton and observe, for the first time beyond the lab, an extraordinary union between carbon monoxide and nitrogen ices. The discovery offers insights into how this volatile mixture can transport material across the moon’s surface via geysers, trigger seasonal atmospheric changes, and provide a context for conditions on other distant, icy worlds.

27 March 2019: Caught in a cosmic dance, our nearest neighbor galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, are cartwheeling and circling each other as they fall toward our galaxy, the Milky Way. The gravitational interaction between the Clouds sparks cosmic fireworks—bursts of star formation as new clusters of stars flame on. How many and what kind of star clusters have been born this way over the history of the Clouds? A new project, the Local Group Cluster Search, invites citizen scientists to help find out!

21 March 2019: Using high-resolution adaptive optics imaging from the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have uncovered one of the oldest star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. The remarkably sharp image looks back into the early history of our Universe and sheds new insights on how our Galaxy formed.

15 March 2019: The 8.4-meter Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) has begun its journey from Tucson to north-central Chile, where it will be integrated with the telescope on Cerro Pachón. The M1M3, in its secure storage container, was loaded onto a Precision Heavy Haul, Inc. transport vehicle outside the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab at The University of Arizona in Tucson early Friday morning. It is now on a 10-day trip to the Port of Houston in Texas, where it will be loaded onto a BBC Chartering ship for a 5-week ocean voyage to Chile.