Announcements 2016

21 Enero 2016: Base Facility Operations (BFO) are now fully implemented for the Gemini North telescope. All operations are now routinely conducted each night from the Hilo Base Facility. The implementation of BFO at Gemini North is the culmination of several years of work by most of Gemini's staff. This includes significant infrastructure improvements at the telescope and base facilities, software upgrades, staff training, and changes at all levels of operations. The result is a milestone that has revolutionized the way Gemini operates and acquires data. Observing crews at Gemini North have been testing the BFO mode since September of 2015. The night crews report that observing is much more efficient in this mode, and the science staff were thrilled to see the system go live from Hilo as our standard operations model. Gemini's Director Markus Kissler-Patig adds that in addition to this being a first for an 8-10 meter-class telescope, Gemini is …

15 Enero 2016: Noticias del Proyecto Con nuestro primer resumen semanal de noticias de 2016 se enlace nuestra holiday card, y señalar que solamente el árbol fue añadido con PhotoShop - todo lo demás es real! Imágenes adicionales de la construcción están siendo añadidas semanalmente al LSST Image Gallery; otros aparecen en Facebook, accesible directamente o a través del LSST News Page. LSST tuvo una fuerte presencia en AAS227, con una nutrida participación en el Ayuntamiento, una mesa en la Feria de Empleo, participación activa en el Hack Day apoyado por LSST, y una exposición en el pabellón de NSF mostrando nuestro video actualizado updated video. La charla del Científico del Proyecto Zeljko Ivezic sobre el LSST Observing Cadence ha sido archivada en Zenodo y disponible a través de la online Image Gallery y Publications enlaces en lsst.org. La planificación de operaciones avanza rápidamente, con una revisión de las funciones de operaciones que …

14 Enero 2016: Seven months after it was first spotted, a puzzle still hangs over the origin of the brightest supernova ever seen. The exploding star, which was found in June 2015 and blazed brighter than 570 billion Suns at its peak, is one of a class of 'superluminous' supernovae. More than 100 times brighter and 1000 times rarer than ordinary supernovae, they have been spotted thanks to a growing number of automated telescope surveys devoted to spotting ephemeral stellar events over wide patches of sky (see 'The brightest supernovae'). Full details of last year’s explosion, known as ASASSN-15lh, were reported on 15 January in Science1. “It challenges all our previous theories of explosion mechanisms and power sources of superluminous supernovae,” says Subo Dong, an astronomer at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in Beijing, whose team discovered the event. Obscure origins As Dong had noted in a report …

8 Enero 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.

1 Enero 2016: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Press Release Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts the emission of gravitational waves by massive celestial bodies moving though space-time. For the past century gravitational waves have eluded a direct detection, but now the LIGO Virgo Collaboration has announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, emitted by a merging pair of black holes (see also Keith Cooper’s news story for further background). Catastrophic mergers of binary systems can also produce brilliant and explosive fireworks of light, so a team of astronomers, including at Harvard, sought evidence of such a visible afterglow. Although none was spotted, this work represents the first detailed search for a visible counterpart of a gravitational wave event. It also will serve as a model for similar event follow-up in the future. “Our team has been anxiously waiting for the first detection of gravitational waves so that we can rapidly point the …