Press Releases: Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory

13 December 2001: Astronomer Robert A. Schommer, one of the leading members of the scientific staff at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and the director of the U.S. Gemini Program, died in Chile on December 12.

14 August 2001: Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Blanco Telescope in Chile have used the distorting effects of a weak gravitational lens to discover and locate a dim cluster of at least 15 galaxies at a significant distance from Earth, using only the mass properties of the cluster, not its visible light.

2 July 2001: Astronomers from Lowell Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory have discovered an icy planetary body orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt roughly equal in size to Pluto’s moon Charon.

11 January 2001: A sharply detailed image of the northwest portion of the Andromeda galaxy, M31, demonstrates the power of an on-going sky survey project sponsored by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

8 January 2001: The National Optical Astronomy Observatory's Deep Wide-Field Survey marks its first release of data today with a large, exhibit-sized image of 300,000 faint galaxies and stars at the opening of the 197th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

30 March 2000: Astronomers from the National Science Foundation's National Solar Observatory are announcing in today's issue of Science that their discovery of periodically varying gas motions below the solar surface provides an important clue toward solving the biggest secret of the Sun - the origin of the 11-year cycle of solar activity.

13 January 2000: Astronomers, high school teachers and their students have discovered 73 novae in the Andromeda galaxy through a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded education program called "The Use of Astronomy in Research Based Science Education" (RBSE). These results will be presented today by Dr. Travis A. Rector and George H. Jacoby of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), in Tucson, AZ, to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta, GA. Novae are stellar outbursts that lead to a rapid brightening when mass is transferred between two stars in a binary system, causing the surface layers of one star to ignite explosively from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei.

31 May 1999: Dr. John W. (Jack) Harvey, astronomer at the National Science Foundations National Solar Observatory (NSO) at Kitt Peak, Arizona, has been awarded the prestigious George Ellery Hale Prize by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of his "outstanding contributions to the field of solar astronomy over an extended period of time".

17 December 1998: The discovery of the acceleration of the universe by two teams of astronomers using the National Science Foundation's (NSF) National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) was named by the journal Science as the top scientific research advance of 1998.

21 April 1998: Two teams of astronomers searching for signs of other solar systems with telescopes in Chile and Hawaii have independently discovered a disk around a nearby star that may be forming--or may have already formed--planets.