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8 May 2018: Astronomers using the Dark Energy Camera on the CTIO Blanco telescope have detected a new dwarf galaxy in the stream of gas linking the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. The new galaxy, Hydrus 1, located in the “water snake” constellation, may have been brought to the Milky Way by the Magellanic Clouds.

3 May 2018: Astronomers using data from both of the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrographs (GMOS - North and South) measured the motions of stars within a sample of 32 massive elliptical cluster galaxies and found the stellar motions inconsistent with these galaxies’ solitary cousins. The galaxies chosen are known as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) because they are the brightest members of large galaxy clusters. The international team of astronomers obtained Gemini spectra to find the relative velocities of stars within each galaxy and then determine the central stellar velocity dispersions and radial dispersion profiles for each galaxy. “This is similar to what we see in our own Solar System with the different velocities of the planets around the Sun,” said John Blakeslee, Gemini Observatory's Head of Science. “We use the planets’ velocities to determine our Solar System’s mass distribution and it is also how we know the Sun’s mass accurately.” The researchers discovered a …

1 May 2018: The April 2018 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. It contains sections on Science Highlights, Community Science & Data, System Observing, and NOAO Operations & Staff. On the Cover Clockwise from upper right: a) Nicholas Mayall at the guiding eyepiece at the prime focus during commissioning of the KPNO 4-meter telescope that now bears his name; b) the Mayall 4-meter under moonlight during the MzLS imaging survey, which was completed in February 2018; c) the Mayall’s primary mirror being lifted out of its cell during an early stage of the work to prepare the telescope for installation of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instru- ment (DESI). By mid-June the entire top end of the telescope will have been removed, and installation of the new prime focus system for DESI will begin. Initial commissioning with the new DESI hardware should begin in November 2018.

25 April 2018: Project & Science News Save the date! The LSST 2018 Project and Community Workshop will take place the week of August 13 in Tucson, AZ. More details will be available soon. Symmetry Magazine, a joint publication of Fermilab and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, published an article about LSST on April 17 titled “The world’s largest astronomical movie,” which features detailed information and visualizations of the LSST Camera. An LSST cross-project team met at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) on April 3-4 to conduct the latest in a series of Early Integration Pathfinder Activities. This activity focused on simulated control and image collection for the nominal Auxiliary Telescope visit sequence. Read more about the activity here, and view a group photo taken at the event in the LSST Gallery. LSST’s series of spring subsystem meetings concluded last week with the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) Subsystem Meeting, held …

19 April 2018: While most supernovae studied to date brighten and fade over a period of weeks, a handful are known to evolve much quicker. KSN2015K reached its maximum brightness in 2 days and faded to half that in only 7 days. To explain the rapid evolution, the discovery team, which includes NOAO astronomers Alfredo Zenteno and Chris Smith, has argued that the star bumped into itself in the explosion!

11 April 2018: Gone in a (cosmological) flash: a team of astronomers found 72 very bright, but quick events in a recent survey and are still struggling to explain their origin. Miika Pursiainen of the University of Southampton will present the new results on Tuesday 3 April at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science. The scientists found the transients in data from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Programme (DES-SN). This is part of a global effort to understand dark energy, a component driving an acceleration in the expansion of the Universe. DES-SN uses a large camera on a 4-metre telescope in the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in the Chilean Andes. The survey looks for supernovae, the explosion of massive stars at the end of their lives. A supernova explosion can briefly be as bright as a whole galaxy, made up of hundreds of billions of stars. Pursiainen and his collaborators …

4 April 2018: In a drama taking place in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a close companion galaxy to the Milky Way, a rare star is speeding out of the galaxy at 300,000 miles per hour. The first runaway yellow supergiant star ever discovered, and only the second evolved runaway star found in another galaxy, the star was once a member of a binary star system and was ejected at high speed when its companion star exploded as a supernova. The discovery was made using the CTIO 4-m Blanco telescope.

27 February 2018: Project & Science News An Education and Public Outreach (EPO) focus group for teachers was held in Tucson on February 3-4. Led by LSST Education Specialist Ardis Herrold, the event gathered 11 high school and college educators from across the U.S. to solicit feedback on prototypes of the online educator tools, including Jupyter Notebook-based interactive astronomy investigations, currently being developed by the EPO team. Read more about the meeting in this recent news post. The Project Office kicked off a series of spring LSST subsystem meetings on February 12 in Tucson, AZ. Subsystem managers, administrators, and other project office staff members joined LSST’s Senior Management team for a day of project updates and discussion. A group photo of the event is available in the LSST Gallery. The next subsystem meeting will be held by Telescope and Site, on February 28-March 2 in Tucson. The first column of the LSST Summit …

19 February 2018: By measuring the brightness of about a dozen stars, lingering just outside of our galaxy, a team of astronomers believe they have solved a nearby intergalactic mystery. The researchers exposed the identities of three ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidates using the Gemini South telescope. The team reports that the objects appear to be loose clusters of stars, not dwarf galaxies as some had previously believed. This finding has profound ramifications on the quantity of cold dark matter around our Milky Way and, by implication, other galaxies. Using the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) at the Gemini South telescope in Chile, an international research team led by Dr. Blair C. Conn of the Australian National University studied three ultra-faint dwarf galaxy candidates, and found they were not as expected. The three ultra-faint dwarf galaxy suspects, DES1, Eridanus III, and Tucana V, located in the vicinity of the Magellanic Clouds, were studied using a …

14 February 2018: Project & Science News A meeting of AURA’s Management Council for LSST (AMCL) took place in Tucson on January 29-30. The AMCL, which meets three times a year, is AURA’s oversight and advocacy committee for LSST. AURA President Matt Mountain was present along with LSST Senior Management for a productive agenda of presentations and discussions. The AMCL will meet again April 19-20 in Washington, DC. The LSST Overview paper will be issued soon; to prepare for this, the Project Office has initiated verification of the “Builders List” in order to correctly credit and recognize the efforts of LSST team members. LSST’s Auxiliary Telescope, which has been under refurbishment at the LSST Project Office in Tucson, will soon undergo functional testing of its mechanical and electrical systems. Read more about the Auxiliary Telescope and its role in the LSST survey in this recent news post. The Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) …

31 January 2018: Project & Science News The 231st AAS Meeting concluded on January 12 in National Harbor, MD. LSST hosted a well-attended Town Hall during the meeting; slides from presentations given by Beth Willman, Federica Bianco, and Adam Bolton at the event are available here. LSST also staffed an exhibit booth (photo here) in the NSF Pavilion throughout the meeting. To alleviate persistent communications challenges with terminology LSST will no longer use the Data Management terms “Level 1,” “Level 2,” and “Level 3” for communication with the scientific community about LSST data products. Instead we will use the clearer terms “Prompt Products,” “Data Release Products,” and “User Generated Products,” respectively. This terminology is consistent with the descriptions of each of the three product types in Project documents. A selection of community-facing Project documents and webpages are being updated to reflect the change. A Provisional Acceptance Test of the washing facility will take …

18 January 2018: Project & Science News Happy New Year, and welcome back! We hope you all had a relaxing holiday break and are ready for the exciting year ahead. LSST Assembly Integration Verification (AIV) Manager Jacques Sebag submitted this spectacular drone footage of the LSST facility, taken on December 28. The video was taken after the LSST team collaborated with subcontractor Besalco to move the facility mobile roof to the flat area located on the north side of the lower enclosure. Congratulations to all for this achievement at the end of 2017! The LSST Network Engineering Team (NET) is pleased to announce the first successful transfer of digital data over LSST/AURA fiber optic networks from the Summit Site on Cerro Pachon, Chile to the Base Site in La Serena, Chile and on to the Archive Site at NCSA in Champaign. The test transmissions started on December 18 and continued through December 22. …

12 January 2018: The Core-collapse Supernova Rate Problem, or the fact that we don’t see as many core-collapse supernovae as we would expect, has a solution, thanks to research using the Gemini South telescope. The research team concludes that the majority of core collapse supernovae, exploding in luminous infrared galaxies, have previously not been found due to dust obscuration and poor spatial resolution. Core-collapse supernovae are spectacular explosions that mark the violent deaths of massive stars. An international team of astronomers, led by PhD student Erik Kool of Macquarie University in Australia, used laser guide star imaging on the Gemini South telescope to study why we don’t see as many of these core-collapse supernovae as expected. The study began in 2015 with the Supernova UNmasked By InfraRed detection (SUNBIRD) project which has shown that dust obscuration and limited spatial resolution can explain the small number of detections to date. In this, the first …

21 December 2017: Project & Science News On December 13th LSST was featured on ABC 7 News with footage from the SLAC National Accelerator Lab. An all-project LSST Joint Technical Meeting will not be held in 2018 as in past years; instead, individual subsystem meetings will be held in the spring. Dates for each of these meetings can now be found in the Digest meeting list below, or on the LSST website. The first of 21 Science Rafts for LSST’s 3.2-gigapixel camera have arrived at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The rafts are arrays of nine imaging sensors, or CCDs, each with 4K-by-4K pixels. To date, 60% of the camera’s sensors have been received at BNL, and delivery rate is on track to maintain the current schedule. Click here for photos of the arrival of the Science Rafts at SLAC. Another milestone for the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) in …

18 December 2017: Using the Gemini South telescope, researchers extracted spectra from extremely faint optical sources which they determined are nurseries of massive stars around an elliptical galaxy. Indeed, the sources were so faint that they were previously undetected and only revealed using ~4 hour exposures with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS). It is speculated that the nurseries formed as the result of a past galactic merger. Using a novel observational technique, called Multi-Slit Imaging Spectroscopy (MSIS) a team, lead by Fernanda Urrutia (Universidad de La Serena and Gemini Observatory), found a new generation of star clusters around the elliptical galaxy, NGC 2865. “The main result of our work is that we were able to detect all the clusters of massive stars around this elliptical galaxy,” said Urrutia. “Elliptical galaxies normally don’t have enough gas to form massive stars, thus we did not expect to observe star formation inside the galaxy, much less …

5 December 2017: LSST News Digest Addendum, December 6, 2017 The following item was not included in the December 5 LSST News Digest:Reminder: The deadline for submitting to the 2018 LSST Corporation Enabling Science Call for Proposals is at Midnight (PST) on Monday, December 18. Information and instructions for submitting a proposal can be found at this link (login required) Project & Science News Seeing the Beginning of Time, a NCSA-produced documentary that includes a segment on LSST, will be screened during the upcoming American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, on Tuesday, January 9 from 7:30 - 8:30 p.m. Check the final AAS meeting schedule for the screening location and other details; more information about the movie can be found here. The Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) continues to come together at subcontractor Asturfeito in Spain; this time-lapse videoshows the top end of the telescope being mounted onto the elevation structure. The TMA is currently …

29 November 2017: Gemini observations played a critical role in research by scientists at the University of Washington in their quest to identify an object which appears to be “photobombing” the Andromeda Galaxy. The researchers determined that rather than being a binary star system within the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy, as previously thought, the object is really a distant galaxy containing a supermassive black hole binary – a pair of black holes orbiting each other very closely within the galaxy’s core. “The Gemini spectroscopic observations revealed the true nature of this puzzling object as a background galaxy with an active nucleus,” said Gemini’s Chief Scientist John Blakeslee. “Careful analysis of the extreme velocities seen in the spectra then led the team to suspect that the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s center is actually a tightly bound binary.” Observations by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory first cast suspicion that things weren’t as simple as they …

21 November 2017: Project & Science News A reminder: The LSST Town Hall at AAS 231 will take place on Wednesday, January 10th, 2018, at 7:30 pm. This Town Hall will include developments in the planning of LSST’s observing strategy and commissioning policies, and updates from the LSST Corporation and Science Collaborations on community preparations for science with LSST. A successful LSST Safety Review, conducted by the Safety Council, took place in Chile on November 7-9, 2017. The focus of this review was to assess Chilean Base Facility and Summit Site safety processes. The presentations and tours demonstrated that safety has been effectively integrated into all levels of the Project, and that there is a high level of commitment to safety by LSST Project Management. Click here for a group photo from the event. LSST’s fiber-optic network came one milestone closer to activation last week; the AURA LSST Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) …

7 November 2017: Project & Science News A Day in the Life of LSST Construction, Part III is now available! We received 142 submissions which were compiled into an 11-minute video that can be viewed in the LSST Gallery and on our YouTube channel. Thank you to all contributors, and to LSST Graphic Designer Emily Acosta for assembling the images, videos, and captions together into the final product. Telescope & Site team members Tomislav Vucina and Doug Neil travelled to Germany recently to review progress on the Coating Plant, which will be used to aluminize both LSST’s Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) and its Secondary Mirror (M2). At the MAN factory in Deggendorf, the LSST Team verified that major components of the Coating Chamber Assembly are in place. The team then traveled to the Von Ardenne facilities in Dresden, where they inspected the Washing Boom and other components of the already-assembled Washing Station. Photos from …

24 October 2017: Project & Science News On the summit of Cerro Pachón, the grouting of the azimuth/dome interface has been completed (click here for a photo). Subcontractor EIE recently held an onsite assembly plan review to confirm the sequence of construction activities, and plans to begin installation of the azimuth rail sections this week. The Primary/Tertiary Mirror (M1M3) cell underwent vacuum testing at subcontractor CAID last week, to identify and eliminate any leaks in the cell. Click here for a photo of the sealed cell during testing, which concluded successfully on October 18. Installation of static supports is scheduled to get underway this week. The first filter for the Commissioning Camera has been completed and has arrived at the Project Office in Tucson. The i-band filter, which is about 12 inches in diameter, is currently undergoing testing in the optics lab. Longtime LSST Communications Manager Suzanne Jacoby will transition to the role …