Advanced Announcement Search

9 August 2016: The 3-D spectroscopic sky-mapping project, DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument), has received formal approval from the US Department of Energy to begin construction. Installation at the Kitt Peak Mayall telescope will begin in 2017. Designed to measure the role of dark energy in the expansion history of the Universe, DESI will measure the redshifts of more than 30 million galaxies and quasars and create a map of the Universe out to a distance of 10 billion light years.

7 July 2016: Two new Kuiper Belt objects, 2014 FZ71 and 2015 FJ345, are among the most distant bodies in the Solar System. They are always further than 50AU from the Sun, and only Sedna and 2012 VP113 have larger perihelia. The discovery was made using data from DECam on the Blanco 4-m telescope at CTIO.

16 June 2016: The rising arc of the Milky Way is captured on Mauna Kea observatory, Hawaii, showing the Gemini North telescope in the foreground. This image is the Photo Composite winner in the Light Category of the 7th International Earth and Sky Photo Contest, co-hosted by NOAO and the founding institution “The World at Night”. This annual contest was created to highlight the natural beauty of the night sky and its growing battle with light pollution. The 10 winners of the 2016 contest, selected from more than 1000 entries taken in 57 countries, are shown in the contest video. The panel of judges included NOAO astronomer Connie Walker.

9 June 2016: Astronomers searching for the galaxy’s youngest planets have found one unlike any other: a newborn ‘hot Jupiter’ whose outer layers are being pulled away by the star it orbits. Possibly in a slow death spiral, the planet was studied with multiple telescopes including the Kitt Peak 4-m Mayall.

1 June 2016: In a rare find, astronomers have detected a young giant planet still embedded in its natal disk of gas and dust. The planet was detected by the wobble it induces in the star that it orbits. The discovery may lend new insights into how planets form. Spectra from the KPNO 2.1m and Mayall telescopes were used in the discovery.

18 May 2016: Transiting planets orbiting bright stars provide a golden opportunity to learn about the nature of exoplanets, their composition and origin. KELT-S, a robotic survey of the southern sky that is designed to detect transiting planets orbiting bright stars, reports its first discovery: a highly inflated giant planet. The planet, KELT-10b, is an attractive target for future studies aimed at characterizing planetary atmospheres. NOAO astronomer David James is a founding member of the survey.

29 March 2016: A Penn State research group led by Dr. Suvrath Mahadevan will build an extreme precision radial velocity spectrometer to detect and characterize worlds beyond our solar system.

23 March 2016: To be deployed as part of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument project, the lenses, which weigh a quarter ton, will help us see the effect of dark energy on the expansion history of the universe.

11 February 2016: Ripples in the fabric of spacetime produced by two merging black holes were detected by the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO; top inset). The announcement comes 100 years after Albert Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves and signals the opening of the gravitational wave Universe. The wide-field imaging capability of DECam at CTIO (bottom inset) was used to search for the optical counterpart of the gravitational wave event.

4 February 2016: The Mosaic-3 camera, mounted on the 4-m Mayall, is on a two-year mission to image the sky in preparation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. Now equipped with cutting-edge, red-sensitive charge-coupled devices (CCDs, top inset image) and new mechanical components (including the focal plate; bottom inset image), Mosaic-3 is the product of a small collaboration of scientists and engineers at Berkeley Lab, Yale University, and NOAO.

1 February 2016: Science Verification data from the Dark Energy Survey now publicly available. Covering only 3% of the full survey area, these data were used to create the largest dark matter mass map to date. The survey is being carried out with Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at CTIO (pictured).

27 January 2016: Images of NGC 5195, the companion to M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, show slender arcs of cool hydrogen-emitting gas (red in inset image) that border two giant arcs of hot X-ray emitting gas observed by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue in inset). The arcs formed when hot gas expelled from the black hole swept up cooler gas from the center of the galaxy. The H-alpha image (red in inset) was taken with the Kitt Peak National Observatory 0.9-meter telescope.

8 January 2016: Weighing in at 500 trillion times the mass of the Sun, the young galaxy cluster IDCS 1426, located 10 billion light years from Earth, is the most massive distant cluster known. Recently weighed using data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, it was first identified with data from the NOAO Deep Wide-field Survey and data taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope.

30 September 2015: Classify galaxies and join the quest to unravel the history of galaxy formation! The public DECaLS survey capitalizes on the wide-field imaging capability of DECam at CTIO and is led by David Schlegel (LBNL) and Arjun Dey (NOAO).

1 September 2015: The September 2015 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. On the Cover An image from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), a public survey mapping 6700 square degrees, approximately one-sixth of the sky, using the Blanco 4-m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The image shows the interacting galaxy system UGC 12589 at a distance of 470 million light-years. The distorted morphologies and diffuse light result from the gravitational interaction between the galaxies.

27 August 2015: Eight new dwarf galaxy “neighbors” of the Milky Way discovered in recent data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). More than 20 such companions to our galaxy have been discovered this year, of which 17 were found in DES data. Dwarf satellite galaxies may provide valuable clues to the nature of dark matter and how galaxies like the Milky Way formed. The Dark Energy Survey is being carried out on the 4-m Blanco telescope at CTIO.

21 August 2015: Discovered in dwarf galaxy RGG118, the petite black hole, only 50,000 times the mass of the sun, is the smallest supermassive black hole to date. NOAO Hubble Fellow Amy Reines is a coauthor on the study.

1 July 2015: The 6th International Earth and Sky Photo Contest, co-hosted by NOAO and the founding institution “The World at Night”, highlights the natural beauty of the night sky and its growing battle with light pollution. The 10 winners of the 2015 contest, selected from among a 1000 entries taken in 54 countries, are shown in the contest video. The panel of judges included NOAO astronomer Connie Walker. This entry, “Above and Underneath” by Evgeny Trisko, was photographed in Pyatigorsk, in the Stavropol region of Russia. It is the fifth place winner from the “Against the Lights” category, which emphasizes the growing issue of light pollution and how it affects our view of the night sky. The panoramic view shows clouds illuminated by towns and villages hidden beneath the inversion layer.

5 June 2015: The public DECam Legacy Survey (DECaLS) is delivering a new dataset that will allow astronomers to probe the structure of the Milky Way, the nature of dark energy, and many other topics in astrophysics. The survey leads David Schlegel (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) and Arjun Dey (NOAO) recently announced the first data release from the survey. The data and catalogs can be accessed at legacysurvey.org. Dive into survey images and explore the Universe using the survey’s Sky Viewer. Future releases are anticipated at 6 month intervals. The survey capitalizes on the wide-field imaging capability of DECam at CTIO.

2 June 2015: This stunning image of the Milky Way arching over CTIO was taken from the eastern edge of the observatory, looking West (and South and North). The panorama shows the central and brightest part of the Milky Way. The bright objects on the left are the two Magellanic Clouds; the Andromeda Galaxy is visible on the right, just above the horizon. The green and red stripes in the sky are from airglow; the orange domes are from light pollution. The panorama is a composite of 9 images, taken on the night of July 31, 2014, with a Canon 6d and a Samyang 24mm lens.