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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.

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.

20 September 2018: New funding from the National Science Foundation will enable the international Gemini Observatory to advance its position at the forefront of the new era of “multi-messenger astronomy” by enhancing its scientific capabilities in high-resolution and rapid-response astronomy.

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.

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.

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.

5 April 2017: Gemini Observatory announces the development of a major new facility-class broadband optical and near-infrared imager and spectrograph named OCTOCAM.

29 December 2016: A new image released today by the Gemini Observatory offers a deep, revealing view into an active stellar nursery. The infrared view peels back layers of obscuring gas and dust to unshroud the inner workings of star formation – and the chaos that accompanies the beautifully messy process of starbirth.

12 October 2016: An international team of astronomers, using the Gemini Multi-conjugate adaptive optics System (GeMS) and the high resolution camera GSAOI, brought the ancient globular cluster NGC 6624 into razor-sharp focus and determined its age with very high accuracy － a challenging observation even from space. In addition to producing a beautiful image, this work ultimately helps astronomers to better understand the formation and evolution of our Galaxy during its earliest development when the Universe was less than two billion years old.

17 June 2016: The world’s most advanced adaptive optics system reveals “shocking” details on star formation in a new image released today by the Gemini Observatory.

5 February 2016: The National Science Board (NSB) and the international Gemini Board have authorized the National Science Foundation (NSF) to award a new 6-year, $208 million cooperative agreement to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA) for the management and operation of the Gemini Observatory.

21 January 2016: Today, in the journal Science, Australian scientist Keith Bannister announced findings that might help solve a 30-year old mystery.

12 November 2015: The Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) is an ambitious three-year study dedicated to imaging young Jupiters and debris disks around nearby stars using the GPI instrument installed on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. On November 12, at the 47th annual meeting of the AAS’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Washington DC, Franck Marchis, Chair of the Exoplanet Research Thrust of the SETI Institute and a scientist involved in the project since 2004, will report on the status of the survey, emphasizing some discoveries made in its first year.

14 September 2015: A team of astronomers has given us our best view yet of an exoplanet moving in its orbit around a distant star. A series of images captured between November 2013 to April 2015 shows the exoplanet β Pic b as it moves through 1 ½ years of its 22-year orbital period.

13 August 2015: Going beyond the discovery and imaging of a young Jupiter, astronomers using the Gemini Observatory's new Planet Imager (GPI) have probed a newly discovered world in unprecedented detail. What they found is a planet about two times the mass of Jupiter, and the most Solar System-like planet ever directly imaged around another star.

9 July 2015: NOAO scientists, using the Gemini Observatory 8-meter telescope in Chile, have obtained the highest resolution image ever obtained for the planetary nebula NGC 2346. Shaped like a butterfly, or an hourglass, but known scientifically as a bipolar planetary nebula, this object is at a distance of 2,300 light-years from our Sun in the constellation Monoceros.

15 June 2015: Using the advanced adaptive optics system GeMS, on the Gemini South telescope, astronomers have imaged a beautiful stellar jewel-box – a tightly packed cluster of stars that is one of the few places in our galaxy where astronomers think stars can actually collide.

6 January 2015: Stunning exoplanet images and spectra from the first year of science operations with the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) were featured today in a press conference at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Seattle, Washington. The Gemini Planet Imager GPI is an advanced instrument designed to observe the environments close to bright stars to detect and study Jupiter-like exoplanets (planets around other stars) and see protostellar material (disk, rings) that might be lurking next to the star.