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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.

4 June 2001: From massive young star clusters swaddled in a dust cocoon 600 trillion miles wide to intriguing structural details in a circumstellar disk around a nearby binary star system, the 8-meter Gemini North telescope is providing astronomers with some of their best-ever infrared views of the processes of star and planet formation.

9 January 2001: Astronomers surveying hundreds of red giant stars in more than a dozen globular star clusters have found clues that may reveal an unexpected origin of lithium, the third element in the Periodic Table.

8 January 2001: The simple spherical geometry of planetary nebula Abell 39 will help astronomers identify the source of very serious errors in measuring the chemical composition of dying stars.

14 November 2000: Astronomers studying how elements heavier than iron were produced in the early Milky Way have identified a distinct series of epochs of galaxy-wide chemical formation.

16 October 2000: The first scientific observations from the Gemini North telescope provide a dramatic glimpse into the elusive core of the Milky Way, including an intriguing bow-shock from a star as it plows into a poorly understood gas cloud a mere 3 light-years from the galactic center.

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.

25 June 1999: At a ceremony on Mauna Kea today, astronomers revealed some of the sharpest infrared images ever obtained by a ground-based telescope. These first high-resolution images from Gemini North reveal the remarkable power of the telescope's technologies, which minimize distortions that have blurred astronomical images since Galileo first pointed a telescope skyward almost 400 years ago. The clarity of these images is equivalent to resolving the separation between a set of automobile headlights at a distance of 2,000 miles!

25 June 1999: At a ceremony in Hawaii today, astronomers revealed some of the sharpest infrared images ever obtained by a ground-based telescope. These first high-resolution images from the new Gemini North Observatory show the remarkable power of the telescope's technologies, which minimize distortions that have blurred astronomical images since Galileo first pointed a telescope skyward almost 400 years ago. The clarity of these images is equivalent to resolving the separation between a set of automobile headlights at a distance of 2,000 miles!

1 June 1999: Dr. Mark Giampapa of the National Science Foundation's National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, has determined that the Sun is in a relatively moderate state of activity. Giampapa's observations of Sun-like stars in M67 suggest that about 40% of the time the Sun is likely to be either significantly more, or significantly less, active. A change to either of these states is likely to cause significant changes in the Earth's climate. These same observations also indicate excursions in the luminosity of the Sun from about 0.2% - 0.5% are possible, compared with the 0.1% variations that have been measured with modern satellite instruments during the 1980s and 1990s. Any variation in what is considered typical or normal solar activity must be taken into account in the study of long-term behavior of the global climate.

31 May 1999: The Sun is known to exhibit a maximum of activity, including solar flares and an increased number of sunspots and coronal mass ejections, approximately every 11 years. Dr. Richard C. Altrock announces today his prediction that the next solar maximum will occur between January and April of 2000 based on a new method employing daily observations of high latitude coronal activity. Dr. Altrock, an Air Force Research Laboratory astronomer at the National Science Foundation's National Solar Observatory (NSO) at Sacramento Peak, New Mexico, will present his result today to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Chicago, Illinois. This prediction is of interest to solar astronomers and others who design and operate satellites.

25 March 1999: Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), near Tucson, Arizona, contributed important optical observations of a Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) discovered on 23 January 1999. The KPNO observations of this particularly powerful and well-observed GRB are included in articles appearing in current issues of the journals Science and Nature. This event was the first GRB detected simultaneously at optical and gamma-ray wavelengths, and may provide the first clear evidence that GRBs emit a stream, or jet, of photons directed out into space like a searchlight.

6 January 1999: Astronomers George H. Jacoby and Taft E. Armandroff of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories in Tucson, Arizona, and James E. Davies of The Johns Hopkins University announced today their discovery of a new galaxy in The Local Group, the group of galaxies within 4 million light-years of our own Milky Way. The new galaxy is the second one that the team has found in the past year by using new computer enhancement techniques applied to 10-year old photographs of the sky. Small galaxies of the type found by Jacoby and collaborators are the most common type of galaxy in the universe, yet the region around the Milky Way Galaxy's big brother, the spiral galaxy in Andromeda, had been thought to be highly deficient of these "dwarf" galaxies before the team began their search. The census of the Local Group, though, is now as high as 43 galaxies, meaning that our neighborhood may not be as unusual as was previously thought.

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.

7 January 1998: Astronomers are announcing today the discovery of an extraordinary number of the most massive stars yet known, all concentrated within a single cloud of gas in a nearby galaxy. A conservative estimate by astronomers Dr. Phil Massey of the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) in Tucson, AZ, and Dr. Deidre Hunter from Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, places over a dozen stars more massive than 100 times the mass of the Sun within this one cluster. The most massive star may be 150 times the mass of the Sun, making it the most massive star yet found. In addition, the processes that control starbirth in this young, dense star cluster seem to be identical to star formation processes ongoing in more common, less dense star forming regions. The discovery leads astronomers to postulate we haven't yet encountered a physical limit to how massive a star can form in nature.