Press Releases

4 April 2007: Astronomers have serendipitously discovered a record-breaking pair of low-mass objects with an extreme orbital separation. The petite objects, each of which has a mass less than 100 times that of Jupiter and could be either stars or brown dwarfs, are separated by more than 5,000 times the distance between the Sun and Earth – a value that breaks the previous record by a factor of three and leaves the duration of their future together uncertain.

22 March 2007: An image released today by the Gemini Observatory brings into focus a new and remarkably detailed view of supersonic "bullets" of gas and the wakes created as they pierce through clouds of molecular hydrogen in the Orion Nebula. The image was made possible with new laser guide star adaptive optics technology that corrects in real time for image distortions caused by Earth's atmosphere.

21 March 2007: Astronomer Buell T. Jannuzi has been named to five-year term as the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona.

7 March 2007: The international star-counting activity known as GLOBE at Night returns from March 8-21 in two flavors: the “classic” GLOBE at Night exercise that anyone can have fun doing with their unaided eyes, and a new effort to obtain precise measurements of urban dark skies using digital sky-brightness meters.

21 February 2007: A beautiful new image of spiral galaxy IC 342 that takes advantage of the dark night sky at Kitt Peak National Observatory is being released today in Washington, DC, at the opening of “The Night: Why Dark Hours Are So Important,” a two-day symposium hosted at the Carnegie Institution.

8 January 2007: Astronomers have announced the discovery of huge quantities of an unusual variety of oxygen in two very rare types of stars. The finding suggests that the origin of these oddball stars may lie in the physics behind the mergers of white dwarf star pairs.

8 January 2007: Fundamental to theories describing active galactic nuclei (AGN) is the prediction that a doughnut-shaped ring of material (a torus) surrounds a supermassive black hole in these energetic galactic cores. Yet, understanding an AGN's torus, or indeed seeing one directly, has proved to be extremely frustrating, and has spurred an ongoing debate about their extent and physical properties.

7 January 2007: The ghostly blue Bubble Nebula and a swan-like dark nebula known as Barnard 163 are featured in beautiful new images taken in 2006 using the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The newly released images are displayed in large format at the NOAO exhibit booth starting today in Seattle at the 209th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

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.

5 January 2007: Google has joined a group of nineteen universities and national labs that are building the Large Synoptic
Survey Telescope (LSST).

14 November 2006: Astronomers have identified 20 new stellar systems in our local solar neighborhood, including the twenty-third and twenty-fourth closest stars to the Sun. When added to eight other systems announced by this team and six by other groups since 2000, the known population of the Milky Way galaxy within 33 light-years (10 parsecs) of Earth has grown by 16 percent in just the past six years.

3 November 2006: The National Science Foundation’s Astronomy Senior Review report, released today, contains a variety of recommendations related to the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

26 October 2006: The National Science Foundation’s Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Exploratorium are joining forces to present a live view of an unusual celestial event: the transit of planet Mercury across the face of the Sun, as seen from Earth.

14 September 2006: Kitt Peak National Observatory boasts the greatest number of research telescopes on one mountain anywhere in the world. In addition to the twenty-five optical and two radio telescopes, Kitt Peak also offers an attractive visitor center complete with exhibits, and a gift shop, daily telescope tours, and world-renowned nightly public observing programs by reservation. However, until now, there was no shuttle transportation available for those people who would prefer not driving up the winding mountain road to the observatory.

3 August 2006: A team led by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been selected by NASA to develop a concept for a space mission to characterize the mysterious “Dark Energy” that permeates the Universe and causes its expansion to accelerate.

1 August 2006: As part of an ongoing search for Earth’s nearest stellar neighbors, astronomers have determined the distance to a stellar-like body known as DEN 0255-477 and discovered that it is the nearest-known L dwarf. This body is now also the faintest object outside our solar system for which its intrinsic visual brightness has been measured.

20 July 2006: A high-resolution image released today by the Gemini Observatory shows Jupiter's two giant red spots brushing past one another in the planet's southern hemisphere.

8 June 2006: Massive star supernovae have been major "dust factories" ever since the first generations of stars formed several hundred million years after the Big Bang, according to an international study to be published in Science magazine on July 14, 2006.

5 June 2006: These results were announced by two teams of researchers during a press conference at the meeting that also included the release of new images of the entire span of M31 obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Gemini teams included Canadian researcher Tim Davidge (NRC, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, Victoria BC) and Knut Olsen of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). The new data about individual stars in M31 obtained with the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, demonstrate dramatically the complementarity of ground-based telescopes, which can record images with unprecedented spatial resolution, and space-based facilities, which have higher sensitivity.

4 June 2006: Two new images from Gemini Observatory released today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary, Canada, show a pair of beautiful nebulae that were created by two very different types of stars at what may be similar points in their evolutionary timelines. One is a rare type of very massive spectral-type "O" star surrounded by material it ejected in an explosive event earlier in its life. It continues to lose mass in a steady "stellar wind." The other is a star originally more similar to our Sun that has lost its outer envelope following a "red giant" phase. It continues to lose mass via a stellar wind as it dies, forming a planetary nebula. The images were made using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South as part of the Gemini Legacy Imaging program.