Announcements 2016

22 January 2016: Project News S. Kahn, V. Krabbendam, and B. Willman are *not* traveling to Washington, DC, as planned for the January 22nd meeting of the AURA Management Council for LSST (AMCL) due to severe weather. Instead the meeting will be held via videoconferencing. The AMCL provides financial oversight and advocacy for the management of LSST. Several members of the Telescope & Site team head to Madrid, Spain next week for a Final Design Review of the Telescope Mount Assembly (TMA) with prime contractor Empresarios Agrupados. On Cerro Pachón, Besalco management honored its employees for completing the first year of LSST construction activities on the summit with no serious injuries or job-site accidents. The first production sensor was received by the Camera team in December and is undergoing testing at SLAC. Successful completion of this analysis is a Level 2 milestone, tracked at the DOE agency level. Personnel Notes The Project Office …

21 January 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 January 2016: Project News With our first Weekly News Digest of 2016 we link to our holiday card, and point out that only the tree was added with PhotoShop - everything else is real! Additional construction images are being added weekly to the LSST Image Gallery; others appear on Facebook, accessible directly or from the LSST News Page. LSST had a strong presence at AAS227, with a well-attended Town Hall, a table at the Career Fair, active participation in the LSST-supported Hack Day, and an exhibit in the NSF pavilion showing our updated video. Project Scientist Zeljko Ivezic’s talk on the LSST Observing Cadence has been archived in Zenodo and made available through the online Image Gallery and Publications links on lsst.org. Operations planning is proceeding rapidly, with a review of operations functions to take place Feb 11-12, 2016 in Tucson. The review panel is: Bob Blum (NOAO), Adam Bolton (NOAO), Brenna …

14 January 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 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.

1 January 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 …