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18 December 2014: Galaxies – spirals laced with nests of recent star formation, quiescent ellipticals composed mainly of old red stars, and numerous faint dwarfs – are the basic visible building blocks of the Universe. Galaxies are rarely found in isolation, but rather in sparse groups – sort of galactic urban sprawl. But there are occasional dense concentrations, often found in the center of giant clusters, but also, intriguingly, as more isolated compact groups (and yes, called Compact Galaxy Groups or CGs). The galaxies in these Compact Groups show dramatic differences in the way they evolve and change with time compared with galaxies in more isolated surroundings. Why is this? Collisions between galaxies in these dense groups are common, leading to rapid star formation, but there seems to be more to the puzzle.

3 September 2013: Tonight, as the sun sinks below the horizon, the world’s most powerful digital camera will once again turn its gleaming eye skyward. Tonight, and for hundreds of nights over the next five years, a team of physicists and astronomers from around the globe, working from an observatory in Chile, will use this remarkable machine to try to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our 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.

1 November 2012: On November 9, 2012, ceremonies on the summit of Cerro Tololo, Chile will mark the dedication of the Dark Energy Camera and the beginning of the 50th anniversary celebration of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). Speakers will include Drs. David Silva (NOAO Director), R. Christopher Smith (Director of AURA Observatories in Chile), Nicole van der Bliek (CTIO Director), Joshua Frieman (Director of the Dark Energy Survey), Timothy Abbott and Alistair Walker (CTIO), and Brenna Flaugher (Fermilab).

17 September 2012: Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded it for the first time.

13 August 2012: Until now, evidence for what astronomers suspect happens at the cores of the largest galaxy clusters has been uncomfortably scarce. Theory predicts that cooling flows of gas should sink toward the cluster’s center, sparking extreme star formation there, but so far – nada, zilch, not-so-much.

16 April 2012: Stars live for a long time, with even the most massive stars having lifetimes measured in millions of years. But, for a mere few thousand years towards the end of their lives, some massive stars go through what astronomers call the yellow supergiant phase. This is remarkably short in astronomical terms, and, as a result, stars in this phase are incredibly rare. In a recent study, astronomers from Lowell Observatory have acted as “stellar paparazzi”, managing to identify hundreds of these rare yellow supergiants, and their more long-lived descendants, the red supergiants in two neighboring galaxies. The Lowell astronomers use these newly identified populations to provide a stringent observational test for the theoretical models which describe how these stars change from blue, to yellow and then to red. These constraints are vital because the behavior of the models in this phase can influence many theoretical predictions, including something as “basic” as what types of stars explode as supernova.

19 December 2011: It sounds like the start of a bad joke: do you know about the bar in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy? Astronomers first recognized almost 80 years ago that the Milky Way Galaxy, around which the sun and its planets orbit, is a huge spiral galaxy. This isn’t obvious when you look at the band of starlight across the sky, because we are inside the galaxy: it’s as if the sun and solar system is a bug on the spoke of a bicycle wheel. But in recent decades astronomers have suspected that the center of our galaxy has an elongated stellar structure, or bar, that is hidden by dust and gas from easy view. Many spiral galaxies in the universe are known to exhibit such a bar through the center bulge, while other spiral galaxies are simple spirals. And astronomers ask, why? In a recent paper Dr. Andrea Kunder, of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in northern Chile, and a team of colleagues have presented data that demonstrates how this bar is rotating.

5 October 2011: The 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt, and Adam Riess for their discovery of the acceleration of the Universe, one of the more surprising cosmological results in modern astronomy. The discovery was enabled in large part through use of National Science Foundation (NSF) facilities operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) with headquarters in Tucson, Arizona and telescopes in Arizona and Chile.

18 July 2011: Astronomers from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and their collaborators have found that hundreds of the stars found in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) were stolen from another nearby galaxy – the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are both neighbor galaxies to our Milky Way Galaxy and easily visible to the unaided eye from the southern hemisphere.

10 September 2008: Astronomers have been puzzling over the engine behind the historical 1843 outburst of Eta Carinae since it happened, but new observations with the Gemini South and the Blanco telescopes in Chile add a startling new clue.

9 January 2008: Observations of the interacting binary star using telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that the disks of hot gas that accumulate around a wide variety of astronomical objects—from degenerate stars in energetic binary systems to supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies—are likely to be much larger than previously believed.

8 March 2006: A dramatic new image of cometary globule CG4 marks the one-thousandth image posted to the online gallery hosted by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory.

9 January 2006: In a feat resembling an intergalactic autopsy, astronomers have used the Gemini South telescope in Chile to obtain a detailed spectrum of an echo of light from an ancient supernova that enables them to identify the original star’s cause of death.

21 December 2005: A team of astronomers has found faint visible echoes of three ancient supernovae by detecting their centuries-old light as it is reflected by clouds of interstellar gas hundreds of light-years removed from the original explosions.

6 December 2005: More than half of the largest galaxies in the nearby universe have collided and merged with another galaxy in the past two billion years, according to a new study using hundreds of images from two of the deepest sky surveys ever conducted.

30 August 2005: A comprehensive survey of more than 4,000 elliptical and lenticular galaxies in 93 nearby galaxy clusters has found a curious case of galactic “downsizing.”

13 January 2003: A team of astronomers led by Matthew Holman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and JJ Kavelaars (National Research Council of Canada) has discovered three previously unknown moons of Neptune. This boosts the number of known satellites of the gas giant to eleven. These moons are the first to be discovered orbiting Neptune since the Voyager II flyby in 1989, and the first discovered from a ground-based telescope since 1949.

8 January 2003: Astronomers have discovered a small body orbiting the Sun at the distance of Neptune whose orbit makes it the first known member of a long-sought population of objects known as Neptune Trojans.