Press Releases 2021

15 March 2021: AstroDay–Chile’s annual astronomy education festival will take place entirely online in Spanish for the first time in 2021, because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2007, AstroDay has provided unique opportunities for the public to engage with the scientists and staff who work at the most important observatories in Chile. This year’s event takes place from 17 to 19 March 2021 and all activities are free to engage with online.

4 March 2021: Astronomers using the recently installed instrument MAROON-X on Gemini North have determined the mass of a transiting exoplanet orbiting the nearby star Gliese 486. As well as putting the innovative new instrument through its paces, this result, when combined with data from the TESS satellite, precisely measures key properties of a rocky planet that is ideal for follow-up observations with the next generation of ground- and space-based telescopes.

22 February 2021: Journey Through the Universe — which, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic, will take place entirely online for the first time in 2021 — will share the wonders of the Universe and the possibilities of a career in science and technology with school students on Hawai‘i Island. This year’s iteration of the flagship astronomy education and outreach program is highlighted by a week of virtual educational programming from 1 to 5 March 2021.

10 February 2021: With the help of the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, and other ground-based telescopes, astronomers have confirmed that a faint object discovered in 2018 and nicknamed “Farfarout” is indeed the most distant object yet found in our Solar System. The object has just received its designation from the International Astronomical Union.

8 February 2021: The Dark Energy Camera (DECam), which was originally designed for the Dark Energy Survey, has captured one of the deepest images ever taken of Messier 83, a spiral galaxy playfully known as the Southern Pinwheel. Built by the US Department of Energy, DECam is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab.

14 January 2021: The Dark Energy Survey has released a massive, public collection of astronomical data and calibrated images from six years of work. Containing data on nearly 700 million astronomical objects, this second data release in the Survey’s seven-year history is the topic of sessions today and tomorrow at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

13 January 2021: Astronomers have curated the most complete list of nearby brown dwarfs to date thanks to discoveries made by thousands of volunteers participating in the Backyard Worlds citizen science project. The list and 3D map of 525 brown dwarfs — including 38 reported for the first time — incorporate observations from a host of astronomical instruments including several NOIRLab facilities. The results confirm that the Sun’s neighborhood appears surprisingly diverse relative to other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy.

13 January 2021: Data from the DESI (Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument) Legacy Imaging Surveys have revealed over 1200 new gravitational lenses, approximately doubling the number of known lenses. Discovered using machine learning trained on real data, these warped and stretched images of distant galaxies provide astronomers with a flood of new targets with which to measure fundamental properties of the Universe such as the Hubble constant, which describes the expanding Universe.

13 January 2021: Astronomers using images from Kitt Peak National Observatory and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory have created the largest ever map of the sky, comprising over a billion galaxies. The ninth and final data release from the ambitious DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys sets the stage for a ground-breaking 5-year survey with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), which aims to provide new insights into the nature of dark energy. The map was released today at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

12 January 2021: The most distant quasar known has been discovered. The quasar, observed just 670 million years after the Big Bang, is 1000 times more luminous than the Milky Way. It is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which weighs in at more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun. Seen more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest yet discovered, providing astronomers with insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early Universe. The result was released today at the January 2021 meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

5 January 2021: A stunning long-exposure observation from the Kitt Peak National Observatory reveals the spiral galaxy NGC 1003 in glorious detail. The deep observation also shows a treasure trove of background galaxies spread throughout the image.