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13 November 2018: Pluto’s terrain shows a “washboard” pattern of fine ridges just north of its great frozen nitrogen sea, Sputnik Planitia. A recent study by the New Horizons team argues that the ridges are deposits of water ice left behind as an ancient frozen nitrogen glacier that once covered the area sublimed away. Water-ice is buoyant in nitrogen ice and is expected to collect in pits formed on the surface of the glacier as the nitrogen sublimes. NOAO Astronomer Tod Lauer is a coauthor on the study.

30 October 2018: Astronomers have discovered that the tiny Sextans dwarf galaxy, which is 100,000 times less massive than the Milky Way, is undergoing a merger with an even smaller companion galaxy. While large galaxies like the Milky Way are thought to form through mergers with smaller galaxies, the new result illustrates how even the smallest galaxies may form that way. The discovery was made with data from the 4-m Blanco Telescope at CTIO.

22 October 2018: Discovered in part with DECam at CTIO, a new dwarf planet patrols the outer Solar System on a highly elongated orbit: it travels within 65 AU of the Sun at closest approach and as far away as 1000 AU. With its distant orbit, the small planet (300 kilometers in diameter) is sensitive to the dynamics at the edge of the Solar System — and the presence of more massive outer Solar System planets, such as the hypothetical Planet X.

15 October 2018: NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered a “hot Earth” in orbit around a star 45 light years away. The planet, which is only 30% larger than Earth, orbits very close to its star, with a period of just 11 hours. The discovery was confirmed using multiple facilities including the CHIRON spectrograph on the SMARTS 1.5m telescope at CTIO.

11 September 2018: The slideshow above highlights images from the Legacy Surveys’ Data Release 7 (DR7), which covers more than a quarter of the sky. More DR7 images of galaxies in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies are available online.

3 September 2018: A research team has discovered that supernovae generated by red supergiants are often preceded by a bright flash, created when expanding gas from the supernova collides with a dense stellar wind launched by the star just before it explodes. To make their discovery, the team studied stars at the time of explosion, by scanning the skies rapidly for 14 nights using DECam on the NSF’s CTIO Blanco telescope. The result has been published in Nature Astronomy.

13 August 2018: Speckle imaging observations made at the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak have been used, in combination with data from other facilities, to confirm the existence of 44 exoplanets. Four of the planets have orbital periods shorter than a day. Sixteen have sizes within twice that of the Earth. The graphic illustrates the planetary sizes and surface temperatures and compares their orbital radii to that of Mercury. The discoveries were made by a team that includes NOAO astronomer Mark Everett. The observations were acquired under the NN-EXPLORE program, a joint program of the NSF and NASA for the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets.

30 July 2018: Observations made with DECam on the CTIO Blanco Telescope have led to the discovery of 12 additional moons of Jupiter, including its smallest known moon, Valetudo, less than one kilometer in diameter. Jupiter is now known to have 79 moons, a staggeringly large number compared to Earth’s single moon. In addition to its small size, Valetudo is also unusual because it orbits out of the plane of the other moons. Click the image to view a video of these newly discovered moons’ orbits.

23 July 2018: Light from a flashlight is dispersed into a spectrum by one of the spectrographs that will be integrated into the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at the 4-m Mayall telescope. Designed to acquire spectra of 5000 astronomical objects simultaneously, DESI will be equipped with ten three-armed spectrographs. DESI will explore the mysterious physics of dark energy, which is believed to accelerate the expansion of the Universe.

16 July 2018: Nine billion light years away, the blue supergiant Icarus is the most distant star ever seen. In 2016 it briefly flared to 2000 times its original brightness as its light was magnified fortuitously by the gravity of a passing star in a foreground galaxy. The result, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, was carried out by an international team of astronomers that includes NOAO astronomer Tom Matheson.

9 July 2018: The millions of asteroids in the Solar System are thought to be the shattered remains of colliding planetesimals, the large rocky bodies that were the building blocks of the planets. New results suggest that most, if not all, of the known asteroids originate from only a few “common ancestors”, i.e., a small number of very large planetesimals. The study, published in Nature Astronomy, was carried out by a team that includes NOAO astronomer Dan Li.

2 July 2018: The original 45-year-old top end of the Mayall telescope was recently removed and a new top ring placed in the dome. The ring will support new optics for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a state-of-the-art spectrometer that can measure the spectra of 5000 astronomical objects simultaneously. DESI will explore the mysterious physics of dark energy, which is believed to accelerate the expansion of the Universe.

25 June 2018: A new generation of sky surveys offers new frontiers for exploration and discovery, and NOAO’s Data Lab is ready to assist! Version 2.0 of the Data Lab’s Science Platform, released this month, features new datasets, including the 30 billion measurements in the NOAO Source Catalog. The above movie shows the developing exposure map of data in the NOAO archive and illustrates the build up of a crowd-sourced survey of the sky.

18 June 2018: The Mayall telescope’s new top end ring was recently installed using a 450 ton crane with a 250 foot boom. The top ring will support new optics for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a state-of-the-art spectrometer that can measure the spectra of 5000 astronomical objects simultaneously. By surveying 30 million galaxies and quasars, DESI will explore the mysterious physics of dark energy, which is believed to accelerate the expansion of the Universe.

11 June 2018: Which stars harbor what kind of planets? The NEID spectrograph, destined for Kitt Peak, will soon study planets discovered by the NASA missions Kepler and TESS. Designed for extreme radial velocity precision and funded by NASA, NEID will arrive at the WIYN telescope later this year. TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was launched in April and will become fully operational this month.

4 June 2018: Astronomers recently reported the discovery of 14 new stars within 10 parsecs of the Sun. The discovery by the RECONS project was made using data obtained with the SMARTS 0.9m telescope at CTIO. Established in 1994, RECONS has discovered one of every seven systems within 10 parsecs. Are more of the Sun’s nearest neighbors yet to be discovered? Stay tuned!

21 May 2018: To enhance U.S. scientific leadership in astronomy and astrophysics, and enable the broader U.S. community to to take advantage of the power of ground-based extremely large optical-infrared telescopes (ELTs), the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO), and the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory (TIO) have embarked on the development of a U.S. Extremely Large Telescope (US-ELT) Program.

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.

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.

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!