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1 February 2023: Astronomers using data from the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF NOIRLab, have made the first confirmed detection of a star system that will one day form a Kilonova — the ultra-powerful, gold-producing explosion created by merging neutron stars. These systems are so phenomenally rare that only about 10 such systems are thought to exist in the entire Milky Way.

12 October 2020: NOIRLab is pleased to announce that limited science operations are being re-established at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Gemini South, and SOAR facilities in Chile after suspension on 18 March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

4 April 2007: Astronomers have serendipitously discovered a record-breaking pair of low-mass objects with an extreme orbital separation. The petite objects, each of which has a mass less than 100 times that of Jupiter and could be either stars or brown dwarfs, are separated by more than 5,000 times the distance between the Sun and Earth – a value that breaks the previous record by a factor of three and leaves the duration of their future together uncertain.

1 August 2006: As part of an ongoing search for Earth’s nearest stellar neighbors, astronomers have determined the distance to a stellar-like body known as DEN 0255-477 and discovered that it is the nearest-known L dwarf. This body is now also the faintest object outside our solar system for which its intrinsic visual brightness has been measured.