Announcements

19 January 2007: Marie-Claire Hainaut, a member of the Gemini science staff, was observing with the Gemini South telescope in central Chile on the night of January 18th when she captured this image of Comet McNaught in the twilight sky. The recently arrived Comet McNaught has put on a world-wide show over the last two weeks during its apparition in the western sky. Surprising even veteran comet researchers, McNaught has become the brightest comet visible in over 40 years. The image taken by Marie-Claire shows the bright nucleus low in the sky over the town of Andacollo in the foothills of the central Andes. The sweeping dust tail of the comet can be seen extending over 30 degrees toward the zenith. When asked about the image Marie-Claire noted, “When I went outside from the telescope control room and looked to the west I was stunned… The comet and its amazingly large tail were …

19 January 2007: January 19, 2007 New mid-infrared images of the Zeta Leporis circumstellar disk obtained with T-ReCS on Gemini South have for the first time revealed what researchers are calling an "exo-asteroid belt" around another star. Far from a passive dust disk, the new data show that there must be some sort of ongoing collisional activity within a few astronomical units (AU) of the star. These collisions sustain the replenishment of the small dust grains detected in the T-ReCS images. The results also lend support to the theory that the Zeta Leporis system contains a large reservoir of asteroid-sized bodies as well as the possibility of rocky planets. The team, lead by University of Florida Ph.D. student Margaret Moerchen and her advisor Charles Telesco, observed Zeta Leporis as part of a broader research program centered on the search for resolved circumstellar disks. The Gemini observations supplement previous observations made in 2001 that …

17 January 2007: This dark nebula that lies within IC 1396 was imaged with the Mosaic-1 imager on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. Dr. Travis Rector explains how this image was created in this video podcast recorded at the recent AAS meeting in Seattle.

8 January 2007: Astronomers studying highly energetic binary stars called polars have obtained the first observational evidence that the intense magnetic fields produced by the white dwarf half of the interacting pair can induce flares, sunspots and other explosive activity in its otherwise low-wattage, low-mass partner.

28 December 2006: About 27 nights of observing time on the SOAR 4.1-meter telescope in Chile are expected to be available to the U.S. community in 2007B through the NOAO observing time allocation process.

21 December 2006: Happy Holidays from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

19 December 2006: A new series of images are now available that provide a "wide-eyed" view of the Gemini North telescope. The images were obtained as part of a program to capture a time-lapse sequence of the Gemini telescopes in operation during the course of one night. Each image shows a complete 180-degree view illuminated by moonlight (except for exterior views). All images were obtained using a circular format fisheye lens and ~50 second exposures to simulate the naked-eye view of the telescope at night.

15 December 2006: A team of US astronomers led by Sebastian Daemgen (University of Arizona) has just released the results of a search for low-mass brown dwarf or planetary companions around young early-type M dwarf stars within 20 parsecs of the Sun. The 41 stars in the survey have age estimates of < 300 million years, comparable to that of the Pleiades. Within the sample 13 objects are found to host fairly bright companions, eight of these (seven binaries and one triplet) are new discoveries (Figure 1). Understanding binarity or multiplicity rates in low-mass stellar systems could provide important clues on the formation of low-mass objects including planetary systems and their population of planets. The survey was conducted using The Gemini North adaptive optics system ALTAIR in its natural guide star (NGS) mode. The strategy of the survey was to target young stars in order to increase the probability of finding intrinsically faint …

12 December 2006: A British team led by Matt Burleigh (University of Leicester) and P. F. L. Maxted (Keele University) have discovered and characterized an extremely rare stellar system composed of a white dwarf and brown dwarf pair. Named WD 0137-349, this pairing is the only known close, detached binary system with a white dwarf and a confirmed substellar companion. The system is exceptionally intriguing given the measured orbital period of P = 116 minutes. Such a short period implies that the stars orbit within one solar radius from one another. This is close enough that the brown dwarf must have survived the period of common envelope evolution where it was completely engulfed by the atmosphere of the red giant progenitor of the white dwarf. Earlier work by Maxted et al. had already established a mass of 0.39 +/- 0.035 Msun for the white dwarf and of 0.053 +/- 0.006 Msun for the …

4 December 2006: includes articles on the NSF Senior Review report and our response, Gemini science in the mid infrared, new partnerships at CTIO, first light for the QUOTA imager at WIYN, and more.

16 November 2006: Astronomers have identified 20 new stellar systems in our local solar neighborhood, including the twenty-third and twenty-fourth closest stars to the Sun. When added to eight other systems announced by this team and six by other groups since 2000, the known population of the Milky Way galaxy within 33 light-years (10 parsecs) of Earth has grown by 16 percent in just the past six years. Data taken with the SMARTS telescopes at CTIO. NOAO Press Release 06-14

13 November 2006:

9 November 2006: The cover of the FY 2006 NOAO Annual Report [1.7 MB pdf] (login required) features this image of M83, taken by the SINGG Survey Team. The report details scientific research, observatory developments, new programs, and educational/public outreach activities for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2006. A pdf of the appendices is also available [957 KB].

6 November 2006: On November 8, 2006, starting at 12:12 p.m. local MST in Tucson, Arizona, the planet Mercury began its transit across the face of the Sun, as seen from Earth. The National Science Foundation’s Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Exploratorium joined forces to present a live view of the 5 hour transit both on the mountain and via webcast.

31 October 2006: Robert A. Simcoe of the MIT-Kavli Center for Astrophysics and Space Research has found new evidence of intensive heavy-element enrichment in intergalactic gas, occurring less than 1 billion years (Gyr) after the Big Bang. His discovery of a high concentration of carbon atoms in the spectra of two very distant quasars implies that vigorous star formation was already underway in some neighborhoods when the universe was only 7% of its present age. Charting the evolution of the carbon abundance is like taking a core sample of the early universe's stellar content. Since carbon nuclei are created through fusion in stellar cores, one would expect their abundance to decline at early times, approaching the formation epoch of the first stars. Simcoe's new observations show that the level of triply ionized carbon (i.e. carbon which has been stripped of three electrons, usually denoted as C IV) remains surprisingly constant as far as …

31 October 2006: NOAO Astronomer Emeritus Michael Belton is a member of the science teams for two new NASA Discovery Program mission studies - one proposal would send the Deep Impact spacecraft onward to Comet Boethin in December 2008; the other would send the Stardust spacecraft to Comet Tempel 1 to observe the crater left there by Deep Impact's explosive earlier visit in 2005, which was observed widely from Kitt Peak, SOAR and Gemini North (see image).

30 October 2006: An international team of researchers used Gemini mid-infrared images to investigate a sample of nearby Luminous InfraRed Galaxies (LIRGs) which are analogous to those LIRGs which are major contributors to the obscured star formation rate (SFR) density at redshift z=1, when the universe was half of its present age. The data were obtained with the mid-infrared imager/spectrograph T-ReCS on Gemini South. In Figure 1 the diffraction-limited images reveal that at high-spatial resolution, approximately 0.3 arcsecond at the observed wavelengths of 8 and 10 microns, the morphology of the mid-infrared emission in the nuclear regions of these galaxies is strikingly similar to that of the ionized gas (Paschen-alpha) revealed by Hubble Space Telescope (HST) NICMOS observations at near-infrared wavelengths. The observed mid-infrared emission of these LIRGs generally consists of bright nuclear emission, multiple circumnuclear and/or extranuclear H II regions, and diffuse emission. The stellar emission, traced by the NICMOS near-infrared continuum …

19 October 2006: The NOAO Hands-On Optics team has established ongoing programs at the Boys & Girls Clubs of South Tucson and Sells (photo). For more, see the the Public Affairs and Educational Outreach section [721 KB pdf] of the September 2006 Newsletter.

16 October 2006: Hawai'i Earthquake Update for Gemini North(as of 5:00 PM HST, Thursday, November 9, 2006) A fairly serious earthquake happened Sunday morning near Waikoloa, on the west side of the Big Island. At magnitude 6.6 this was a much stronger earthquake than we are accustomed to here in Hawai'i. Shortly after the event Gemini had staff on the summit to assess the damage to the telescope. We will provide updates as they warrant and information becomes available. The following item was updated at 5h00 pm HST on Thursday, November 9th Repairs to the Gemini North Secondary System have been successfully completed! The system was thoroughly tested in the lab and will be reattached to the top end of the telescope on Friday November 10th. The first half of Friday night is currently scheduled for engineering tests and, if these are successful, the telescope will be handed over for instrument tests. In …

13 October 2006: Using the near infrared integral field spectrograph CIRPASS at Gemini South, Ruben Diaz and an international team of astronomers, have discovered a previously unknown hidden mass concentration that looks like a second nucleus in the starburst galaxy M83. The mass concentration is located at the youngest end of a giant star forming arc near the galaxy's center (geminiann06019a). This concentration probably represents the wreckage of the nucleus of the smaller galaxy which is being "swallowed" by M83. This double nucleus arrangement is also associated with complex kinematics near the galaxy center (geminiann06019b). The masses of the objects were derived from the kinematics of the ionized gas. The nucleus of the intruder body has an estimated mass of about 16 million times the mass of the Sun, compared to 2 million solar masses for the optical "main" nucleus. The two nuclei are about 100 parsecs apart and are probably harboring black …