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22 December 2021: Using observations and archival data from several of NSF NOIRLab’s observatories, together with observations from telescopes around the world and in orbit, astronomers have discovered at least 70 new free-floating planets — planets that wander through space without a parent star — in a nearby region of the Milky Way. This is the largest sample of such planets found in a single group and it nearly doubles the number known over the entire sky.

5 January 2020: Astronomers using the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a program of NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, have identified several overlapping bubbles of hydrogen gas ionized by the stars in early galaxies, a mere 680 million years after the Big Bang. This is the earliest direct evidence from the period when the first generation of stars formed and began reionizing the hydrogen gas that permeated the Universe.

5 June 2013: Stars are known to form in dense clouds of gas and dust, but why do some regions show prodigious rates of star formation, while others barely produce any young stars at all? Many of the richest sites are found in distant galaxies: the name “starburst” is applied to them. Now, a team has identified a region in our own galaxy that may deserve this title, and help explain what leads to the furious production of new stars in a starburst region.

19 November 2012: One of the major puzzles in astronomy today is the nature of the mysterious force that astronomers have dubbed Dark Energy. And one tool in understanding this force is encoded in the distribution of clusters of galaxies in the Universe. Thus, new work by a team of astronomers that has yielded exquisitely precise distances of a large sample of clusters may lead to breakthroughs in understanding the expansion history of our Universe.

30 November 2009: Using NEWFIRM on the Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak, Veilleux, Rupke and Swaters have reported the discovery of warm H2 gas in the prototypical galactic wind of M82. They report filaments extending above and below the disk, roughly coincident with the location of the galactic wind in this galaxy.