Announcements

4 September 2012: From the 27th to the 31st of August, Gemini Observatory held their annual “Viaje al Universo”. The week long program brought astronomy into the classroom, with a wide variety of educational talks and workshops throughout schools in the Elqui Valley, La Serena and Coquimbo. The schools that participated this year were: Colegio Jerónimo Godoy from Pisco Elqui, Liceo Mistraliano from Paihuano, Colegio Claudio Arrau and Cardenal Caro from Coquimbo; Colegio San José, Saint Mary El Milagro, Christ School, Colegio Alemán, Sagrados Corazones and José Manuel Balmaceda from La Serena. With guidance from Gemini, the math and physics teachers and school principals worked over the course of a year on the proposal for this program. In addition to visiting the schools, experts from the US and Santiago led engaging rocket launching workshops throughout the week. Two talks were held on Wednesday the 29th at the Intendencia Regional. The first by Roderick …

28 August 2012: A research team led by University of Texas at Austin astronomy graduate student J.J. Hermes used the Gemini North telescope on Mauna Kea Hawai‘i to observe two white dwarf stars in a close gravitational embrace. Based on this work with Gemini and several other telescopes, Hermes and his team confirmed that the pair’s grip on each other is tightening very quickly. So quickly in fact, that the change in the pair’s period (slightly less than 13 minutes) is measurable (even over the tenure of a graduate student!) These measurements help confirm another ramification of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which holds that the energy the pair loses in the shortened period is carried away in gravitational waves. The team’s paper, to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, finds that the pair’s period loses about 0.25 milliseconds per year, which is almost exactly what the General Theory of Relativity predicts. …

28 August 2012: The September 2012 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. On the Cover May's Solar Eclipse and June's Venus Transit silhouette the telescopes on Kitt Peak.

30 July 2012: Today, Dr. Markus Kissler-Patig begins his tenure as the Gemini Observatory Director. This marks an important event for the Observatory and comes at a time when we are poised to deliver an exciting new suite of scientific capabilities to the community. I am confident that Markus will bring the necessary leadership, vision and innovative ideas to meet the challenges the observatory faces. I welcome Markus and look forward to implementing some of the innovative ideas he has for Gemini. I know the Observatory staff will give him their full support. I also thank Nancy Levenson for her strong leadership over the past several months as Interim Director. William S. Smith,AURA President

18 July 2012: The National Science Board has approved the LSST project, allowing the NSF Director to put the top ranked ground based initiative of the 2010 Decadal Survey in a future budget. See the NSF press release 12-137. NOAO is a founding member of the LSST collaboration working on the site, enclosure, and telescope that will be located at Cerro Pachón in Chile (shown above).

6 July 2012: High-resolution, mid-infrared observations at Gemini North and South have revealed a wide range of morphologies for low-luminosity active galactic nuclei (AGN). While the data present a broad characterization of these objects' properties in this spectral region, they also present an interesting puzzle to ponder. Active galactic nuclei (AGN), the supermassive black holes that feed on gas, dust, and stars at the centers of galaxies, spend most of their existence in a near dormant state. Until recently, astronomers had observed only a handful of low-luminosity AGN in the infrared at high resolution. Therefore, we didn't have a good, general overview of their properties in this potentially revealing spectral region. Our observations of 22 low-luminosity AGN, taken with both of Gemini's mid-infrared instruments (Michelle and T-ReCS), have changed this situation. The images reveal a wide range of morphologies, from galaxies dominated by a central, compact source (much like images of higher-luminosity Seyferts …

26 June 2012: This image was obtained with the wide-field view of the Mosaic II camera on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory on January 12th and February 7th, 2012. An array of dark Bok globules, known as Thackeray’s Globules, can be seen in silhouette against the emission nebula IC 2944 in the constellation Centaurus. The image was generated with observations in the B (blue), I (orange) and Hydrogen-Alpha (yellow) filters. In this image, north is up, and east is to the left. This is one of the last observations completed with the Mosaic II camera before it was decommissioned.

7 June 2012: Venus transit June 5 2012.

4 May 2012: Left: Some last-minute tests are carried out on the new DECam prime focus cage as it stands under the disassembled Blanco 4-m telescope the night before it is installed. Right: With the Blanco 4-m telescope locked in a vertical position and the old prime focus cage removed, the new DECam prime focus cage is winched up to the top end to be installed. On May 3, 2012 the new prime focus cage for DECam was installed. The assembly (or “Camera”) includes the cage, hexapod, cabling, optics, and (for now) dummy imager.

27 April 2012: An international team uses Gemini to follow up on a rare transient X-ray source discovered by the Chandra X-ray Observatory in late 2010 within the nearby galaxy M83. Observations with the Gemini South telescope are the first to capture the object’s optical glow and initiate additional observations with the Hubble Space Telescope. From the Gemini/HST data a characterization emerges of a black hole with an unexpectedly low-mass, highly evolved giant companion, whose atmosphere is intermittently streaming material into an accretion disk feeding the black hole. Because of its relative closeness, face-on orientation, and enhanced level of star formation, spiral galaxy M83 is a favorite among astronomers - professional and amateur alike. M83 is also a prolific host to supernovae explosions (and their remnants), making it a frequent target for Gemini scientists. In April of 2011, Frank Winkler (Middlebury College) and Bill Blair (Johns Hopkins University) used Gemini South to make …

16 April 2012: Using NOAO facilities, astronomers from Lowell Observatory have acted as “stellar paparazzi”, managing to identify hundreds of rare yellow supergiants and their more long-lived descendants, the red supergiants, in two neighboring galaxies. These newly identified stellar populations provide an important constraint on the theoretical models which describe how these stars change from blue, to yellow and then to red. The behavior of the models in this phase can influence theoretical predictions, including what types of stars explode as supernova.

12 April 2012: The Gemini Science Meeting, a forum for users of the Gemini telescopes, is scheduled for July 17-20, 2012 in San Francisco California. Registration and abstract submission are currently available online here In addition, this url has all of the relevant details on this meeting for anyone planning to participate. The deadline for abstracts is April 27th and registration, June 8th. This meeting offers many opportunities for users (and potential users) of Gemini to provide input on future directions of the observatory – in order to better serve our user communities. This includes sessions on the future of high-resolution optical spectroscopy at Gemini and an opportunity for community participation in the long-range planning process for the observatory. Gemini’s new director, Markus Kissler-Patig will be attending and actively soliciting user input as he sets the course for Gemini’s future. We look forward to seeing you in the city by the bay in …

14 March 2012: Astronomers using the Gemini South telescope have discovered the first clear-cut example of a windy helium and nitrogen rich central star of a planetary nebula. This work provides the best evidence yet that there is another way to make hydrogen poor stars in the late-life stages of low mass stars - like the Sun. The international team, led by Brent Miszalski of the South African Astronomical Observatory and the Southern African Large Telescope, were searching for binary companions to central stars of planetary nebulae, when they stumbled across the rarest of stellar gems. Gemini observations of the nucleus of IC4663 (geminiann12005a) revealed a peculiar mix of helium and nitrogen emission lines, unique and entirely out of place for a planetary nebula, but nonetheless an apparent clone of high mass Wolf-Rayet stars. Planetary nebulae nuclei are the extremely hot, inert cores of low mass stars like the Sun, which are not …

8 March 2012: “All it takes is a spark at a young age to ignite the desire to reach for the stars…” Roberta Chu, Senior Vice President, Bank of Hawai‘i For community leaders like Roberta Chu, Gemini’s eighth annual Journey Through the Universe program is inspirational. Chu, who served as a community ambassador, helping scientists and engineers visiting local Hilo classrooms, adds, “…it’s inspiring to see our students instilled with the possibility of someday being a part of the world-class science taking place on Mauna Kea.” With almost 400 classroom visits, 8,000 students impacted, sold-out public events, educator workshops, and visiting educators and scientists from around the United States and the world, the 2012 version of Journey Through the Universe (“Journey”) has, “taken on a life of its own,” says Janice Harvey, Gemini’s local outreach team leader for the program. In addition to the numerous distinguished guests and lecturers at Journey 2012, Jeff …

4 March 2012: The March 2012 NOAO Newsletter is online and ready to download. This issue includes information pertaining to the 2012B Call for Proposals, which are due March 29th. On the Cover The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) is a liquid nitrogen cooled, 520-megapixel digital camera that is housed inside a high-vacuum Dewar; here, it poses in front of the CTIO Blanco 4-m telescope on which it will be mounted.

16 February 2012: Small icy bodies are the remnant leftovers from the formation of planets in the Solar System. Ongoing observations made with Gemini of an extremely red pair of such Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in an orbiting binary system offer an indirect glimpse into the past. Scott Sheppard (Carnegie Institution of Washington), Darin Ragozzine (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), and Chad Trujillo (Gemini Observatory) obtained nearly monthly observations of the pair, named 2007 TY430, to yield precise measurements of their orbital motion. Uniquely, compared with other Kuiper Belt binaries, this pair’s current mutual orbit is likely primordial, unchanged since the formation of the system. The primordial orbit reveals the binary’s formation mechanism, and therefore provides hints of past conditions during the formation of the Solar System itself. The research team concludes that this system may have formed in a more complex interaction involving yet another body. The composition of the bodies’ ultra-red material …

9 February 2012: The image above is from the Ground-based System Roadmap Committee’s summary of the results from their November 2011 survey of the community’s use of the U.S. System of O/IR facilities. Shown are the US telescopes used by more than 3% of the approximate 1000 U.S. based survey respondents. The size of each ellipse represents the number of users, while the thickness of the lines between telescopes is proportional to the number of common users.

26 January 2012: FLAMINGOS-2, the Gemini near-infrared imager and long-slit and multi-object spectrograph, is undergoing commissioning on the Gemini South telescope. We now invite the Gemini community to propose System Verification (SV) science programs for the imaging and long-slit spectroscopy modes. The deadline for receipt of all proposals is Monday February 6, 2012, 23:59 UT. Approximately 40 hours of telescope time is available for these near-infrared imaging and long-slit spectroscopy programs. The observations will be executed during bright-time during the first half of March, 2012. System Verification will provide an end-to-end test of the new FLAMINGOS-2 instrument, from the proposal process to the delivery of the data, in advance of offering the new capability to the community for general use. Therefore, it is a "shared risk" observing mode, and incurs responsibility on the successful proposers to provide feedback to the observatory in a timely fashion. SV data also have a shortened proprietary period. …

25 January 2012: Results from the Gemini Cluster Astrophysics Spectroscopic Survey (GCLASS) reveal that galaxies at a redshift of about one have at least two reasons for the curtailment of star formation. In a paper accepted in The Astrophysical Journal lead author Adam Muzzin and collaborators conclude that both mass and environment play a role in determining when a galaxy’s star formation is snuffed out. Does galaxy formation depend mostly on nature or nurture? In other words, is it primarily a self-regulated process, controlled by properties of the galaxies themselves such as their total stellar mass (i.e., “nature”), or is controlled by processes external to the galaxies such as the environment they live in (i.e., “nurture”)? In the nearby universe we know that both factors are important but at redshifts z ~ 1, when the universe was only ~40% of its current age and large-scale environments were just in the process of forming, …

12 January 2012: On January 9 and 10, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Subra Suresh visited NSF optical astronomy facilities in Northern Chile. The NSF group included Dr. Ed Seidel (head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate) and Dr. Anne-Marie Schmoltner who is a program manager in the NSF International Science and Engineering Office.