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6 June 2019: An international team of researchers led by astronomer Jong-Hak Woo obtained deep spectroscopy from Gemini, combined with light echo measurements from multiple observatories, to confirm a black hole “missing link.”

20 May 2019: Astronomers using the Gemini Observatory explore Neptune’s largest moon Triton and observe, for the first time beyond the lab, an extraordinary union between carbon monoxide and nitrogen ices. The discovery offers insights into how this volatile mixture can transport material across the moon’s surface via geysers, trigger seasonal atmospheric changes, and provide a context for conditions on other distant, icy worlds.

21 March 2019: Using high-resolution adaptive optics imaging from the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have uncovered one of the oldest star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy. The remarkably sharp image looks back into the early history of our Universe and sheds new insights on how our Galaxy formed.

22 January 2019: After slowly forming stars for the first few billion years of their lives, the Magellanic Clouds, near neighbors of our own Milky Way galaxy, have upped their game and are now forming new stars at a fast clip. This new insight into the history of the Clouds comes from the first detailed chemical maps made of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

10 January 2019: An unusual supernova studied by multiple telescopes, including the SOAR telescope and other telescopes at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), is thought to herald the birth of a new black hole or neutron star, caught at the exact moment of its creation. Observations made with facilities ranging from X-rays to optical and radio wavelengths were used to understand this remarkable event. These multi-messenger observations give astronomers a rare glimpse into the physics at play during the creation of a black hole or neutron star.

9 January 2019: Observations from Gemini Observatory identify a key fingerprint of an extremely distant quasar, allowing astronomers to sample light emitted from the dawn of time. Astronomers happened upon this deep glimpse into space and time thanks to an unremarkable foreground galaxy acting as a gravitational lens, which magnified the quasar’s ancient light. The Gemini observations provide critical pieces of the puzzle in confirming this object as the brightest appearing quasar so early in the history of the Universe, raising hopes that more sources like this will be found.

8 January 2019: On the night of 9 January 2019, the V. M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), high in the mountains of Chile, will close the camera’s shutter on the final image from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) – a survey that has mapped 5,000 square degrees of the heavens, almost one-quarter of the southern sky. Although the survey is ending, both the camera used in the survey and the survey data itself are expected to continue to yield abundant new discoveries.

1 November 2018: Astronomers use the Gemini Observatory to investigate a tiny star that is likely the oldest known star in the disk of our galaxy. The diminutive star could have a disproportionate impact on our understanding of the age and history of our Milky Way Galaxy. It also provides a unique glimpse into the conditions present in the young Universe shortly after the Big Bang.

2 August 2018: Observations from the Gemini South and other telescopes in Chile played a critical role in understanding light echoes from a stellar eruption which occurred almost 200 years ago. Gemini spectroscopy shows that ejected material from the blast is the fastest ever seen from a star that remained intact.

23 April 2018: Hydrogen sulfide, the gas that gives rotten eggs their distinctive odor, permeates the upper atmosphere of the planet Uranus – as has been long debated, but never definitively proven. Based on sensitive spectroscopic observations with the Gemini North telescope, astronomers uncovered the noxious gas swirling high in the giant planet’s cloud tops. This result resolves a stubborn, long-standing mystery of one of our neighbors in space

28 March 2018: Astronomers using data from the Gemini and W. M. Keck Observatories in Hawai‘i have encountered a galaxy that appears to have almost no dark matter. Since the Universe is dominated by dark matter, and it is the foundation upon which galaxies are built, “...this is a game changer,” according to Principal Investigator Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University.

10 January 2018: Where do the stars in our Galaxy come from? All the stars we see in the night-time sky belong to our Milky Way galaxy, and while most stars were likely born here, in the Milky Way, many appear to have originated in other galaxies and migrated to our shores. Tell-tale evidence comes from streams of stars created when small galaxies interact with the Milky Way. Eleven new stellar streams, discovered in data from the Dark Energy Survey, currently in progress at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), provide new evidence for this picture.

6 December 2017: Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of many galaxies. While some — like the black hole at the center of our own Galaxy — live quiet lives, occasionally snacking on a star or two, others feed voraciously, consuming gas and stars and growing rapidly in mass.

6 December 2017: Observations reveal the mass of earliest known supermassive black hole which radiates from an era in the universe only 690 million years after the Big Bang. Researchers, using unique spectroscopic data from Gemini Near-Infrared Spectrograph (GNIRS) on Gemini North determined its mass at a whopping 800 million times the mass of our Sun.

20 November 2017: Gemini Observatory provided key observations in characterizing an object visiting from outside our solar system, ‘Oumuamua. After the object was discovered by Pan-STARRS1 on Haleakala, both Gemini telescopes dropped everything to observe ‘Oumuamua for three nights as it quickly dimmed from view. Researchers found that despite its interstellar origin, the object is similar in composition to some objects in our Solar System but its shape is unlike anything found around our Sun.

15 November 2017: The visit of the interstellar interloper 1I/2017 U1, recently spotted streaking through the Solar System, gives the people of Earth their first chance to study up close an object from another planetary system. In a study carried out with the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands, astronomers find that despite its foreign origins, U1 is familiar in appearance — its size, rotation, and color are similar to that of asteroids in our Solar System. Its familiar appearance supports the long-held view that our Solar System once ejected its own flotilla of such messengers out into interstellar space.

3 November 2017: Gemini Observatory, using the Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrograph on the Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i, has confirmed the spiral nature of what is now the most distant known spiral galaxy. The galaxy's light, revealing how the galaxy looked some 11 billion years ago, is gravitationally lensed by a massive foreground cluster of galaxies to help reveal the distant pinwheel nature of the galaxy.

16 October 2017: The precious elements in our Earth-bound bling, gold and platinum, are thought to have been forged in ancient fiery cataclysms, when pairs of neutron stars spiraled together and merged into black holes. A similar event, the merger of a neutron star binary, was recently detected in gravitational waves by two gravitational wave observatories (Advanced LIGO and Virgo) and at optical-infrared wavelengths by the Blanco, SOAR, and SMARTS 1.3m telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón. The detected optical emission, the first optical counterpart to a gravitational wave event, confirms that binary neutron star mergers are indeed major cosmic production sites of rare heavy elements.

16 October 2017: Gemini Observatory "pulled all of the stops" to bring a gravitational wave source into focus and capture early optical and infrared light from the merger of two neutron stars. The critical ground-based observations spanned almost a month during the summer of 2017 and allowed astronomers to dissect the first electromagnetic light emissions ever associated with a gravitational wave event.

30 August 2017: In 2013 a small meteoroid, the size of a house, hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. The explosion shattered windows, and more than a thousand people were treated for injuries from flying debris. How many similar-sized rocks have orbits that bring them close to Earth? A new study has answered that question using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The result lends new insights into the nature and origin of small meteoroids.