Announcements 2016

19 June 2016: View CFHT release. The novel collaboration between the Gemini Observatory and Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope (CFHT) called GRACES (Gemini Remote Access to CFHT ESPaDOnS Spectrograph), helped to characterize a “hot Jupiter” around the T-Tauri star V830 Tau. The work appears in the current advanced online issue of the journal Nature. GRACES uses an innovative 270-meter fiber cable to transport light from the Gemini 8-meter telescope to the ESPaDOnS Spectrograph at CFHT. The system began operating in late 2015 and now is a popular option allowing Gemini and CFHT users to perform high-resolution optical spectroscopy with Gemini North’s larger mirror. The Nature paper is available online (subscription required) and is summarized in the press release from Observatoire Midi Pyrenees in Toulouse, France and CFHT that follows (release is reproduced verbatim from original): Newborn Giant Planet Grazes its Sun For the last 20 years the giant planets known as hot Jupiters have presented astronomers …

17 June 2016: Project News Registration is open for the LSST 2016 Project and Community Workshop taking place in Tucson, AZ, August 15 – 19. The meeting sessions consist of three elements: plenary talks, breakout sessions, and an unconference. The plenary talks will be of broad interest to the scientific community, selected to be useful and informative both to newcomers and those familiar with LSST. We invite all community participants to help develop ideas for breakout sessions, and with assistance from the collaborations we have initiated some threads in the LSST community forum to capture the conversation. The starting point is here. Additional detail has been added to the online agenda and information about ground transportation has been added to the website. Several members of the Telescope & Site team traveled to Mestre, Italy the week of June 6th to conduct a Final Design Review (FDR) of the LSST dome with vendor EIE …

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.

10 June 2016: Project News Registration for the LSST 2016 Project and Community Workshop is open and agenda details are coming together on the meeting website. The workshop is scheduled August 15 – 19 as follows: An all-day Commissioning Planning Workshop will take place on August 15th, along with an afternoon Science Advisory Committee meeting. Additional breakout rooms are available. A Joint NSF/DOE Status Review will take place August 16 – 18 involving LSST Project staff Tuesday (project status plenaries, open to Project and Community members) and Wednesday (breakout sessions). The Community Workshop will begin at 9 am on Wednesday and continue through Friday lunch. Community participants are encouraged to contribute ideas, until Wednesday June 15, for breakout sessions through discussion threads in the LSST community forum starting here. Wednesday plenary topics include “O/IR Resources Needed to Maximize LSST Science” (B. Willman), “A Science Collaboration Update” (L. Walkowicz), and “LSST’s Observing Strategy and …

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.

3 June 2016: Project News The LSST 2016 Project and Community Workshop will take place the week of August 15th in Tucson, AZ, and the website is now OPEN for registration: https://project.lsst.org/meetings/lsst2016/. Community participants are encouraged to contribute ideas for breakout sessions at this Workshop, through discussion threads in the LSST community forum. The starting point is here. The Database team at SLAC hosted their 9th annual XLDB conference last week at the SLAC Linear Accelerator Laboratory. XLDB events are attended by users and providers who meet to discuss the real-world challenges, practical considerations, and nuts-and-bolts solutions in the realm of managing and analyzing extreme scale data sets. Presentations are available on the conference website. Several members of the Telescope & Site team will travel to Venice, Italy, next week for a Final Design Review of the Dome with vendor EIE Group. Meanwhile the Telescope Mount Assembly is moving along with construction of …

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.

27 May 2016: Project News AURA is now a member of the Object Management Group (OMG), an international, open membership, not-for-profit technology standards consortium. OMG is responsible for the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) standard used by the LSST Systems Engineering team to conduct much of their work in a Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) environment. The LSST project is one of the heavier users of the language in a "real world" project setting. OMG Membership provides LSST the opportunity to share lessons learned as well as to influence future enhancements to the SysML standards. The LSST Science Advisory Committee has summarized its last several meetings in a series of recommendations and questions to the LSST Project Office; topics include the draft Science Operations plans, and details of Level 1 alerts and the longer-term availability of data releases to the community. Twenty members of the LSST team met in Tucson this week for a …

24 May 2016: Using the Gemini Planet Imager astronomers have successfully monitored the motion of a planet around the forming exoplanet system orbiting the star HD 95086 and suggest that more unseen planets are present. The large international team, led by Julien Rameau, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université de Montréal (Canada), used the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) at the Gemini South telescope in Chile to observe the system over a period from 2013 until early this year. “During this short time we directly imaged the exoplanet, known as HD 95086 b, a 4-5 Jupiter mass planet, and its motion,” says Rameau. With these data, Rameau and his team determined that this planet is orbiting nearly face-on from our perspective, at about 60 astronomical units or twice the distance between our Sun and Neptune, and it has a low eccentricity, or nearly circular, orbit. Rameau adds, “This extremely high-resolution imaging with GPI was …

20 May 2016: Project News This week on Cerro Pachón concrete was poured to form the lower portion of the telescope pier; all concrete work is scheduled for completion by the end of July. Also, the first three containers of materials for the PFlow facility lift have arrived on site. Registration for the LSST 2016 Project & Community Workshop will open next week. An agenda sufficiently detailed to plan travel will be distributed by email and the website will go live. The SQuaRE Team within Data Management (DM) has released LSST the Docs, a new documentation publishing platform. LSST the Docs will allow DM to create and iterate on documentation more effectively, while also giving readers a better experience. DM representatives engaged with the IVOA community at the IVO Northern Spring Meeting in South Africa last week. Both LSST and IVOA are interested in collaborating, using IVOA interfaces to support LSST needs. Three …

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.

13 May 2016: Project News According to Law Decree #353 from March 16, 2016, Chile will go into Winter time schedule this coming weekend. At midnight on Saturday May 14, all clocks in continental Chile and the Chilean Antártica will be set back by one hour (to 11:00 pm, Saturday 14th). Please consider this time change when making plans for international meetings, video or phone calls. The time difference between Chile and Tucson will be 3 hours. The next face-to-face meeting of LSST’s Science Advisory Committee will be on Monday August 15, co-located with the All Hands Meeting. The committee’s job is to represent the wider scientific community and to advise the LSST Project Office as decisions are made throughout the LSST construction phase. The LSST Project Science Team (PST) met in Seattle from May 9th-11th. Topics discussed during this meeting included: the Data Products Definition Document, the image quality error budget, image …

11 May 2016: Before low-medium mass stars become white dwarfs they pulsate wildly and eventually spew their outer layers into space – often forming beautiful planetary nebulae. The same stars are predicted to continue pulsating during their transformation to a white dwarf, if they have helium in their atmospheres. A team from the University of Oklahoma used Gemini North, in conjunction with the 1.2-meter FLWO telescope in Arizona, to observe a much-sought-after link between these pulsations and helium in the star’s atmospheres. The researchers studied a trio of low mass white dwarf precursors, each with a mass less than one-third the mass of our Sun, and with pulsations ranging from approximately 5-10 minutes. According to team leader Dr. Alexandros Gianninas these GMOS-N observations appear to confirm the predictions of models based on non-adiabatic pulsation theory that predict the helium connection. “The nature of the observed pulsations matches almost perfectly with the predictions of …

6 May 2016: Project News Over forty participations attended a three day workshop on the O/IR Capabilities Needed to Maximize LSST science at Biosphere 2, May 2nd- 4th. This workshop was sponsored by the Kavli Foundation and endorsed by NSF AST. Joan Najita (NOAO) and Beth Willman chaired the workshop and related study (http://www.noao.edu/meetings/lsst-oir-study/). Study Group leads were David Trilling (Northern Arizona University, LSST Solar System science collaboration Chair), Suzanne Hawley (University of Washington, LSSTC executive board member), Josh Simon (Carnegie Observatories), Doug Finkbeiner (Harvard), Ryan Foley (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Greg Rudnick (University of Kansas), and Jeff Newman (University of Pittsburgh, LSST DESC Deputy Spokesperson). A summary report from the study and workshop will be released in late summer.An impressive picture of a completed deck plate manufactured by Tucson vendor CAID Industries, who is building our M1 M3 mirror cell, can be found in the Telescope Gallery. Systems Engineering trade studies cleared …

29 April 2016: Project News The T&S group met with designers from CAID, Inc. to perform a hazard analysis of the M1M3 cart system. CAID is under contract to provide final design of the M1M3 cart, along with the M1M3 Cell Weldment. This meeting provided a good opportunity to cooperatively discuss functional requirements to ensure safe operation will be provided by the design of the system and choice of components. New pictures of ongoing Telescope Mount Assembly Fabrication (TMA) in Spain can be found in the Telescope Gallery. M. Juric, interim Data Management (DM) Lead, and J. Becla, interim Project Manager for DM traveled to Tucson this week for productive sessions with the Science Quality and Reliability Engineering (SQuaRE) team and the Project Office. The Camera team announced its award for filter coatings to Materion Precision Optics in Westford MA. See, http://www.materion.com/Precisionoptics Personnel Notes David Kittelson has joined the Central Administrative Services (CAS) …

22 April 2016: Project News The Project Office supported the AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) meeting last week in Washington, DC. Steve Kahn also gave an overview of LSST status to the LSSTC Board; his presentation has been posted on our public website. An AURA Board of Directors Meeting and the Annual Meeting of Member Representatives took place this week in Tucson. As part of the program, each AURA Center gives an informal Open House presentation. LSST used this opportunity to premiere our “Day in the Life of LSST Construction” video, a compilation of 170 images submitted by individuals working on LSST on March 23, 2016. Members of the Telescope team traveled to the Moog/CSA Engineering facility in Mountain View, CA to conduct the Integration and Test Plan Review for the hexapod and rotator system contract. The team also held a kickoff meeting in Tucson at CAID Industries, Inc., to review their …

8 April 2016: Project News LSST project members are preparing for an active week in Washington, DC, April 11 – 15. Meetings taking place include those of the LSST Corporation (LSSTC) Board and Executive Board, as well as AURA’s Management Council for LSST (AMCL). LSSTC Institutional Member representatives and their government relations officers will make visits to Capitol Hill on Tuesday and then attend a reception in the Rayburn Building that evening hosted by LSSTC and AURA, for guests to learn more about LSST. Assorted meetings between LSST management, government, and agency officials round out the week. The LSST Science Advisory Committee (SAC) met on Monday, April 4. The main topic of discussion was a presentation from Deputy Director Beth Willman, on the plans for and scope of LSST Science Operations. Beth is looking for feedback from the SAC on all aspects of this question by early summer; the SAC's next meeting will …

5 April 2016: Using the FLAMINGOS-2 spectrometer/imager at Gemini South, astronomers have characterized an especially young, free-floating analogue to Jupiter in our neighborhood (92 light years away). The discovery and Gemini follow-up is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint on astro-ph) and described in the Western University press release that follows. Western-led astronomy team discovers Jupiter analogue among young stars A team of astronomers from Western University's Centre for Planetary Science and Exploration (CPSX) and the Carnegie Institute of Washington has discovered one of the youngest and brightest free-floating, planet-like objects within relatively close proximity to the Sun. At an age of only 10 million years, which means its practically a baby in space time, the object identified as 2MASS J1119–1137 is between four and eight times the mass of Jupiter. Using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and other ground-based telescopes, 2MASS J1119–1137 was identified by its unique light …

1 April 2016: Project News Following the Python in Astronomy 2016 meeting held last week in Seattle, members of LSST Data Management met with people from the AstroPy community to discuss areas of overlap and synergy between the two projects. AstroPy is a community driven effort to build core libraries for data processing in astronomy; compatibility with AstroPy is desirable for delivery of L3 data products. Read more in the community forum here. DM working groups for science pipelines, science user interface, and data product design (hardware) all met this week, with the goal of reviewing, refining, and prioritizing requirements and design details. On Cerro Pachón this week, the first pieces of the Dome have been received and are safely stowed until they can be embedded in the concrete pier. Parts of the PFlow facility lift are leaving from Wisconsin this week for early site integration. Dome vendor EIE has representatives on the …

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.