Press Releases

14 September 2008: Astronomers have unveiled what is likely the first picture of a planet around a normal star similar to the Sun.

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.

2 September 2008: The single-piece primary and tertiary mirror blank cast for the LSST is "perfect", say project astronomers and engineers.

20 August 2008: Dr. R. Chris Smith has been selected as the next director of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). Smith will succeed Dr. Alistair Walker in November. Walker will return to the scientific staff of CTIO after five years as director.

22 July 2008: Astronomer Pierre Martin, director of science operations at the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT), has been selected as the new director of the WIYN Observatory, which operates 3.5-meter and 0.9-meter telescopes on Kitt Peak.

26 June 2008: In what appears to be a masterful illusion, astronomers at Gemini Observatory have imaged two nearly identical spiral galaxies in Virgo, 90 million light years distant, in the early stages of a gentle gravitational embrace. The new image was obtained at the Gemini South telescope in Chile using GMOS, the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph.

21 May 2008: Astronomers have observed the aftermath of spectacular stellar explosions known as supernovae before, but until now no one has witnessed a star dying in real time. While observing supernova 2007uy with the Swift X-ray Telescope, Alicia Soderberg and Edo Berger (Princeton University) discovered a mysterious X-ray flash elsewhere in the galaxy NGC 2770 located about 90 million light years away (Figure 1). Within a few hours observatories around the world scrambled to study its light. In a rapid sequence of events the Gemini North telescope was able to capture and dissect the object’s light in a set of optical spectra that contains the earliest spectrum ever obtained of a massive star ending its life in a supernova explosion outside of our galaxy’s neighborhood.

22 April 2008: The international star-hunting activity known as GLOBE at Night inspired 6,838 measurements of night-sky brightness by citizen scientists around the world, including 660 digital measurements using handheld sky-quality meters.

2 April 2008: The well-known naked-eye star cluster Omega Centauri may be home to an elusive intermediate-mass black hole. Observations made using Gemini Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope provide convincing evidence that such black holes do exist and could even lead to an understanding of how they might evolve into larger supermassive black holes like the ones found at the cores of many galaxies.

25 March 2008: The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) has selected Dr. David Silva as the new director of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), based in Tucson, Arizona.

17 March 2008: The University of Arizona's Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory is about to cast a new kind of giant optic for a unique wide-field survey telescope, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The telescope will be the widest, fastest, deepest eye of the new digital age. Mirror Lab workers will begin loading 51,900 pounds of glass into the mirror mold early today.

18 February 2008: The international star-counting activity known as GLOBE at Night returns for its third edition from February 25-March 8, 2008, with assistance from the educational outreach networks of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) to help spread the campaign more widely to amateur astronomers and science centers.

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 January 2008: The Gemini South Multi-Object Spectograph (GMOS) recently captured a dramatic image of a vast cloud complex named DEM L316 located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The peanut-shaped nebula appears to be a single object, but the latest research indicates that it is really comprised of two distinct gas and dust clouds formed by different types of supernova explosions.

8 January 2008: A new wide-field image of Pickering’s Triangle taken with the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory is being released today in Austin, Texas, at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

3 January 2008: The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) Project is pleased to announce receipt of two major gifts: $20M from the Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences and $10M from Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

28 November 2007: A dwarf star with a surprisingly magnetic personality and a huge hot spot covering half its surface area is showing astronomers that life as a cool dwarf is not necessarily as simple and quiet as they once assumed.

14 November 2007: Astronomers have found evidence for the formation of young rocky planets around the star HD 23514 located in the well-known Pleiades (Seven Sisters) star cluster that is easily visible in the current evening sky.

17 July 2007: Frigid geysers spewing material up through cracks in the crust of Pluto’s companion Charon and recoating parts of its surface in ice crystals could be making this distant world into the equivalent of an outer solar system ice machine.

30 May 2007: The coolest-known star-like object beyond the solar system is giving astronomers a new look at the differences between massive planets and the smallest brown dwarfs. This newly discovered object, called ULAS J0034-00 and located in the constellation Cetus, has a record-setting surface temperature of 600-700 K, cooler than any known solitary brown dwarf. In addition, it’s a relative lightweight, with an estimated mass of only 15-30 times that of Jupiter (although they both have about the same diameter).