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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.

16 October 2017: The precious elements in our Earth-bound bling are thought to have been forged in ancient fiery cataclysms, when pairs of neutron stars spiraled together and merged into black holes. Telescopes at CTIO recently pinpointed and studied the light from such a merger. The first optical counterpart to a gravitational wave detection, the discovery confirms that merging neutron star binaries are indeed major cosmic production sites of rare heavy elements.

2 October 2017: A stunning collection of images showcased in the 8th International Earth & Sky Photo Contest highlights the beauty of the night sky and the battle with light pollution. The contest is a collaboration between NOAO, the World at Night (TWAN), and Global Astronomy Month, a program of Astronomers Without Borders (AWB). NOAO astronomer Connie Walker, recent president of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and director of the Globe at Night program, served as one of the contest judges.

3 August 2017: New results from the Dark Energy Survey confirm that the Universe is mostly made of dark energy (70%) and dark matter (26%), with normal baryonic matter comprising just a smidge (4%). In other words, the Universe is mostly made of stuff we don’t understand! The results of the survey, which is being carried out with DECam on the CTIO Blanco telescope, were derived from high precision maps of gravitational lensing and large scale structure.

21 July 2017: Ten billion years ago, a massive star ended its life in a brilliant explosion three times as bright as all of the stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, combined. News of its death, which recently reached Earth, was detected in the Dark Energy Survey being carried out with DECam at the CTIO Blanco telescope (pictured, above right). The supernova is one of the most distant ever discovered and confirmed.

19 June 2017: Discovered with DECam on the CTIO Blanco telescope, the diminutive moon S/2017 J1, only a mile across, takes 2 years to complete an orbit around Jupiter. Its retrograde orbit — in the direction opposite to Jupiter’s spin — tells us that the moon originated elsewhere and was captured by Jupiter. The inset shows the discovery images taken by astronomers Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo. The discovery brings to 69 the total number of Jovian moons known.

19 April 2017: Located 92 AU from the Sun, DeeDee is the second most distant trans-Neptunian object known — only the dwarf planet Eris is further away. Discovered in the Dark Energy Survey, which is being carried out at CTIO, DeeDee is petite, with a diameter ¼ that of Pluto. DeeDee was discovered by an international team, including NOAO astronomers Alistair Walker and Tim Abbott.

22 March 2017: While observing for the DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS), Rongpu Zhou (University of Pittsburgh) set up a camera to capture a time-lapse of the evening. For the first 18 seconds of the video, the moon illuminates the foreground as if it were daylight, while the night sky rotates overhead. As the moon sets, many more stars become visible, and our galaxy, the Milky Way, rises as the Magellanic Clouds set behind the Blanco 4m Telescope. The time-lapse was taken on 4 March 2017.Click the image to view the time-lapse and to see more options.

2 March 2017: The March 2017 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. It contains sections on Science Highlights, Community Science & Data, System Observing: Telescopes and Instruments, and NOAO Operations & Staff. On the Cover NOAO is developing tools for the astronomical community to enable research using big datasets from multiple sources. The cover image is the first panel of “Tales of the Modern Astronomer: Boom Goes the Night,” which tells the story of a young researcher who uses tools such as ANTARES to find the optical afterglow of a gravitational wave detection by combining LIGO with the LSST alert stream to identify optical afterglow candidates that can be followed up with telescopes such as Gemini and the Blanco 4mtelescope using the Dark Energy Camera.

3 February 2017: Over 200 students from six Tucson high schools recently built Galileoscopes, small mass-produced telescopes that offer an inexpensive way to view the same celestial objects studied by Galileo. The telescope-building event, part of the MathMovesU program, was led by Raytheon Engineers and the UA Early Academic Office in partnership with NOAO and the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association. The MathMovesU program aims to inspire students to consider majoring in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields in college and to pursue STEM careers. Local media coverage of the event:

9 January 2017: Artificial light at night is a threat to astronomical research, personal safety, and the health of humans and wildlife. To address the challenge posed by the proliferating use of LEDs for billboards and street lighting, NOAO, in partnership with other concerned organizations, recently convened a workshop to showcase successful strategies for reducing light pollution. The workshop was held at the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) where the AAS Council announced a three-part resolution on light pollution, including calling on all AAS members to protect dark skies in their communities.

29 December 2016: Dr. Vera Rubin began observing at Kitt Peak National Observatory in 1963 at the 36-inch telescope. With her colleague Kent Ford, she continued using the Kitt Peak 2.1-m, accumulating over 60 galaxy rotation curves over the following years. Flat rotation curves were directly visible from the spectra: these data provided compelling observational evidence for a new kind of matter in the Universe, “dark matter”. Vera Rubin continued observing at Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo throughout her long career, and will be greatly missed by the entire NOAO science staff, the mountain technical staff, and everyone who had the good fortune to meet her.

15 November 2016: The DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) has released reduced images and source catalogs covering between 4000 and 8000 square degrees of sky in three wavelength bands. Dive into survey images and explore the Universe with the survey’s Imagine Sky Viewer. DECaLS, which is being carried out on the CTIO Blanco telescope, is one of three public surveys that will jointly image 14,000 square degrees of sky to provide targets for the upcoming Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument cosmology project at the Kitt Peak Mayall telescope.

24 October 2016: A recent community-based study takes a science-driven look at the question “What supporting OIR capabilities will be needed to maximize the science enabled by the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST)?” The study report quantifies needed capabilities and highlights ways that existing, planned, and future resources can be positioned to accomplish community science goals.

11 October 2016: Studies of a distant corner of the Universe, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, made with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed distant galaxies rich in molecular gas. Their high gas content likely fueled the high rate of star formation during the “Golden Age” of galaxy formation 10 billion years ago. The discovery was made by international team of astronomers, including NOAO astronomer Mark Dickinson.

29 September 2016: Beginning in 2017, open access time on the LCO global telescope network will be available to the US community through the NOAO TAC. The LCO network includes nine 1m and two 2m optical telescopes that are optimized for time-domain studies. A call for proposals will be issued by NOAO early next year.

19 September 2016: The red color near the north pole of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, originates on Pluto. Once a mystery, it now appears that the red color of “Mordor Macula” arises as methane gas escapes from Pluto’s atmosphere and freezes onto the icy surface of Charon’s north pole. UV light from the Sun then transforms the methane into reddish organic materials. The New Horizons team that reported this result includes NOAO astronomer Tod Lauer.

12 September 2016: Astronomers have discovered ultra-faint stellar systems in the direction of the Sagittarius stream, the stream of stars that is being pulled out of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy as it orbits our own Milky Way galaxy. Similar in size to globular clusters but much fainter, the new stellar systems straddle the fuzzy boundary between dwarf galaxies and stellar clusters. The discovery was made by a team of astronomers using data from the Dark Energy Survey being carried out at CTIO. Team members include NOAO astronomers Kathy Vivas, Tim Abbott, David James, Chris Smith, and Alistair Walker.

2 September 2016: The September 2016 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. It contains sections on Science Highlights, System Science Capabilities, System Observing: Telescopes and Instruments, and NOAO Operations & Staff. On the Cover This map, created using the NOAO Data Lab Data Discovery Tool, shows the total exposure in science frames taken with any of the DECam, or KPNO and CTIO Mosaic imagers. The sky has been rotated to center on the Dark Energy Survey “footprint.”

19 August 2016: Astronomers using data from the Kepler spacecraft have discovered five planets in orbit around a nearby bright star. The planets have orbital periods ranging from 15 days to 1 year and sizes from 2.5 times the radius of the Earth to approximately the size of Jupiter. Because the central star is bright, future transit observations may be able to characterize the atmospheres of the planets. The Robo-AO adaptive optics system on the Kitt Peak 2.1m telescope was used to rule out a non-planetary origin for the transit signals.