Press Releases

3 September 2012: On August 29th, the lights went off and the stars turned on during a special event at Beijing Planetarium. As part of the meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), Dr. Malcolm Smith, National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) was honored for his long and substantial contributions to light pollution abatement on behalf of astronomical observatories and the community at large. Dr. David Silva (NOAO Director) and Bob Parks (International Dark-Sky Association Executive Director) presented Dr. Smith with the IDA David Crawford Lifetime Achievement Award. This award, in honor of the International Dark-Sky Association’s (IDA) co-founder and first executive director, recognizes those who have made substantial effort and change in light pollution abatement education.

29 August 2012: Nature hath no fury like a dying star – and astronomers couldn’t be happier…

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.

29 June 2012: That surprise you feel when your favorite store turns off its lights, locks up its doors, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, goes out of business? That's just how astronomers felt recently when a dusty disk of rocky debris around a nearby star abruptly shut down and by all appearances went out of business.

14 May 2012: A new Legacy Image from the Gemini Observatory reveals the remarkable complexity of the planetary nebula Sharpless 2-71 (Sh 2-71). Embroiled in a bit of controversy over its “birth parents” the nebula likely resulted from interactions between a pair of two old and dying stars. Legacy images like this one share the stunning beauty of the universe as revealed by the twin 8-meter Gemini telescopes in Hawai‘i and Chile.

24 April 2012: In mid-July 2012, astronomers from around the world will converge in San Francisco, California to discuss recent and future science from the Gemini Observatory. From direct imaging of exoplanets, to the most massive black holes ever measured, the meeting’s program features a wide-range of topics that are summarized on the conference’s webpage (above).

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.

3 April 2012: Learn how Gemini is leading the way in developing the next generation of adaptive optics to power the new Gemini Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics System (GeMS).

23 March 2012: Dr. William Smith, President of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. (AURA), announced today the selection of Dr. Markus Kissler-Patig as the new Director of the Gemini Observatory.

6 January 2012: Gemini’s next-generation adaptive optics system produces highest-resolution with largest field-of-view ever captured from the ground using laser guide star technology.

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.

1 December 2011: Observations with the Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i reveal evidence for what astronomers are calling the largest black holes ever measured in our nearby cosmological neighborhood. This result is crucial in explaining the long-standing mystery of where the largest black holes are hiding in our present-day universe.

30 November 2011: The NASA Kepler Mission is designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to discover Earth-size planets in or near the “habitable zone,” the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist, and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets. It now has another planet to add to its growing list. A research team led by Steve Howell, NASA Ames Research Center, has shown that one of the brightest stars in the Kepler star field has a planet with a radius only 1.6 that of the earth’s radius and a mass no greater that 10 earth masses, circling its parent star with a 2.8 day period. With such a short period, and such a bright star, the team of over 65 astronomers (that included David Silva, Ken Mighell and Mark Everett of NOAO) needed multiple telescopes on the ground to support and confirm their Kepler observations. These included the 4 meter Mayall telescope and the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory. The accompanying figure shows the size of the Kepler field, seen over Kitt Peak.

20 November 2011: An asteroid impact with the earth can really ruin your day: just consider the dinosaurs. Most asteroids, also known as minor planets, orbit the sun beyond the planet Mars and present no danger, but there is a class of asteroids whose orbits cross the orbit of the earth. If one of these asteroids and the earth are at the same point in their orbits at the same time, a collision could occur. Called Near Earth Objects (NEOs), astronomers are interested in discovering as many of these as possible, and then tracking them in order to compute more accurate orbits. In this way, if a potential future collision were to be identified many years in advance, space probes could carry out steps to tweak the path of the NEO and deflect the collision. A program to track NEOs is being carried out at NOAO by Mark Trueblood with Robert Crawford (Rincon Ranch Observatory) and Larry Lebofsky (Planetary Science Institute). And last summer, a Beloit College student, Morgan Rehnberg, has developed a computer program (PhAst), available via the web, to help with this effort.

2 November 2011: Join in the celebration of Gemini Observatory’s one-thousandth scientific paper by becoming a friend of Gemini on Facebook. There, you can follow along, through the end of 2011, as some of the top science results (and dozens of stunning images) from the twin 8-meter telescopes are featured each week in “Gemini Gems.”

19 October 2011: In a paper just published in Nature, Aaron Geller (Northwestern U) and Robert Mathieu (U of Wisconsin) have shown that blue stragglers are most probably formed from mass transfer or mergers in binary systems, rather than originating from stellar collisions as has also been proposed. Observations made at the WIYN 3.5m of the old open cluster NGC 188 show that blue stragglers in long period binaries have companions with masses ~ 0.5 solar mass, with very little scatter.

5 October 2011: Astronomy and optical science lost a great pioneer and innovator when Dr. Aden Meinel passed away on 2 October 2011. Meinel led the development, and became the first Director, of the Kitt Peak National Observatory, located near Tucson, AZ. He then went on to become Director of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona, where he also founded the Optical Sciences program.

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.

31 August 2011: This wide-field panorama of star formation was captured with the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope on Kitt Peak. Located in the constellation of Orion (the Hunter), the image show a portion of one of Orion’s giant molecular clouds (known as “Orion A”) where new stars are forming.

10 August 2011: A team of astronomers, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, have reported the first extragalactic detection of the C70 fullerene molecule, and the possible detection of planar C24 (“a piece of graphene”) in space. Letizia Stanghellini and Richard Shaw, members of the team at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona describe how collisional shocks powered by the winds from old stars in planetary nebulae could be responsible for the formation of fullerenes (C60 and C70) and graphene (planar C24). The team is led by Domingo Aníbal García-Hernández of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias in Spain and includes international astronomers and biochemists.