Press Releases

2 June 2017: Gemini Observatory astronomer Meg Schwamb is this year’s recipient of the Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science. The prize is awarded annually by the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Schwamb is being honored for the creation and development of new tools and venues to facilitate planetary science communication. She will receive the medal in October at the Division of Planetary Sciences’ annual meeting hosted in Provo, Utah.

2 June 2017: On July 1, 2017, Dr. Laura Ferrarese begins a one-year term as Interim Director of the Gemini Observatory, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) on behalf of the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the International Gemini participants which include the United States, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile.

17 May 2017: Astronomers using the SOAR telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory report the discovery of a spectacular extended jet from a young brown dwarf. With masses too low to sustain hydrogen fusion in their interiors, brown dwarfs occupy the mass range between stars and giant planets. While young stars are commonly found to launch jets that extend over a light year or more, this is the first jet with a similar extent detected from a brown dwarf. The result lends new insight into how substellar objects form.

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

4 April 2017: It’s a kinder, gentler Neptune, says Gemini astronomer Meg Schwamb in describing a new result that leaves little doubt about how Neptune gently swept a class of planetoid pairs into the outer Solar System.

5 January 2017: Gemini Observatory provides critical rapid follow up observations of a Fast Radio Burst – one of modern astronomy's greatest enigmas. These observations provide the first details on a burst's distant extragalactic host.

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.

9 November 2016: Astronomers using critical observations from the Gemini Observatory have found the strongest evidence yet that the formation of more massive stars follow a path similar to their lower-mass brethren - but on steroids!

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.

24 August 2016: Using the world’s most powerful telescopes, an international team of astronomers has discovered a massive galaxy that consists almost entirely of Dark Matter. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini North telescope – both on Maunakea, Hawai‘i – the team found a galaxy whose mass is almost entirely Dark Matter. The findings are being published in The Astrophysical Journal.

1 August 2016: Using the world’s most powerful telescopes, an international team of astronomers has discovered a massive galaxy that consists almost entirely of Dark Matter. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Gemini North telescope – both on Maunakea, Hawai‘i – the team found a galaxy whose mass is almost entirely Dark Matter. The findings are being published in The Astrophysical Journal.

18 July 2016: Gemini Observatory plays a key role in the latest harvest of over 100 confirmed exoplanets from NASA’s K2 mission, the repurposed Kepler spacecraft. Three instruments on the Gemini North telescope delivered precise images verifying many of the candidate stars as planetary system hosts. Researchers note that these systems could contain a considerable number of rocky, potentially earthlike exoplanets.

6 July 2016: As the Juno mission begins exploring Jupiter in our Solar System, scientists explore a solo world that researchers say looks more similar to Jupiter than any exoplanet yet discovered.

20 June 2016: A team of astronomers has confirmed the existence of a young planet, only 11 million years old, that orbits very close to its star (at 0.05 AU), with an orbital period of 5.4 days. Approximately 5 times the size of the Earth, the new planet is a “super-Neptune” and the youngest such planet known. The discovery lends unique insights into the origin of planetary system architectures.

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.

25 May 2016: Astronomers have uncovered evidence for a vast collection of young galaxies 12 billion light years away. The newly discovered “proto-cluster” of galaxies, observed when the universe was only 1.7 billion years old (12% of its present age), is one of the most massive structures known at that distance. The discovery, made using telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, has been reported in the Astrophysical Journal.

5 April 2016: Astronomers using the 8-meter Gemini North telescope on Hawaii’s Maunakea have probed an enigmatic, and unexpected, supermassive black hole dominating the core of a large galaxy in the cosmic backwaters.

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.

23 November 2015: An astonishing number of faint low surface brightness dwarf galaxies recently discovered in the Fornax cluster of galaxies may help to solve the long-standing cosmological mystery of “The Missing Satellites”. The discovery, made by an international team of astronomers led by Roberto Muñoz and Thomas Puzia of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). CTIO is operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).