Press Releases

10 January 2005: The National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) has teamed with the Spitzer Science Center (SSC) to offer a dozen graduates from NOAO’s advanced teacher professional development program a unique chance to make research-quality observations with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.

1 January 2005: Like the annual New Year’s fireworks display, astronomers at Gemini Observatory are ushering in 2005 with a striking image that dazzles the eye with stellar pyrotechnics.

15 December 2004: Using adaptive optics on the Gemini North and Keck II telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i, a U.S. team has discovered a new phenomenon in the atmosphere of Saturn’s largest moon Titan.

9 December 2004: On Thursday, December 9th, 2004 the Gemini Observatory announced the six teachers selected for the 2005 StarTeachers exchange program between Hawaii and Chile.

8 October 2004: Until now, astronomers have been nearly blind when looking back in time to survey an era when most stars in the Universe were expected to have formed. This critical cosmological blind-spot has been removed by a team using the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope, showing that many galaxies in the young Universe are not behaving as expected some 8-11 billion years ago.

5 October 2004: Astronomers using the Gemini North and Keck II telescopes have peered inside a violent binary star system to find that one of the interacting stars has lost so much mass to its partner that it has regressed to a strange, inert body resembling no known star type.

16 September 2004: For more than 400 years, astronomers both professional and amateur have taken a special interest in observing Mira stars, a class of variable red giants famous for pulsations that last for 80-1,000 days and cause their apparent brightness to vary by a factor of ten times or more during a cycle.

9 June 2004: To investors looking for the next sure thing, the silver coating on the Gemini South 8-meter telescope mirror might seem like an insider's secret tip-off to invest in this valuable metal for a huge profit. However, it turns out that this immense mirror required less than two ounces (50 grams) of silver, not nearly enough to register on the precious metals markets. The real return on Gemini's shiny investment is the way it provides unprecedented sensitivity from the ground when studying warm objects in space.

3 June 2004: New observations from the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope on Kitt Peak show striking visual evidence for a galaxy being stripped bare of its star-forming material by its violent ongoing encounter with the hot gas in the center of a galaxy cluster.

2 June 2004: Astronomers have peered into the fog of the early universe and discovered a young and extremely distant galaxy at a time when the Universe was only about six percent of its present age. When compared with other recent findings about the “dark ages” of the early universe, this discovery suggests that this murky era could have lasted the better part of a billion years.

25 May 2004: Quasars are the most brilliant of cosmic fireworks, shining out across billions of light-years of space. However, a recent study done at Gemini Observatory shows that they appear to blaze forth from humdrum galaxies in the early universe, and surprisingly, not from the giant or disrupted ones astronomers expected.

25 May 2004: This image of Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) was taken at the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ, on May 7, 2004.

21 May 2004: Combining images from orbiting and ground-based telescopes, an international team of astronomers has located the eye of a cosmic hurricane: the source of the 1 million mile-per-hour winds that shower intergalactic space from the galaxy M82.

30 March 2004: A timely discovery by American amateur astronomer Jay McNeil, followed immediately by observations at the Gemini Observatory, has provided a rare glimpse into the slow, yet violent birth of a star about 1,500 light-years away. The resulting findings reveal some of the strongest stellar winds ever detected around an embryonic Sun-like star.

26 January 2004: Like a doctor trying to understand an elderly patient's sudden demise, astronomers have obtained the most detailed observations ever of an old but otherwise normal massive star just before and after its life ended in a spectacular supernova explosion.

22 January 2004: A duo of Chinese and American astronomers have discovered a young star in the fierce environs of the Rosette Nebula that is ejecting a complex jet of material riddled with knots and bow shocks.

8 January 2004: Near the end of its lifetime, a star like the Sun ejects its outer layers into space, producing a hazy cloud of material called a planetary nebula. The complex shapes and dazzling colors of planetary nebulae make them some of the most popular objects in the night sky, for both amateur observing and scientific study.

5 January 2004: Where can you find the best advice on the most engaging astronomy-related books and teaching materials in Spanish?

14 November 2003: Dr. Alistair Walker has been confirmed by the AURA Observatories Council as the new director of Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in La Serena, Chile.

12 November 2003: The naked-eye Pleiades star cluster has long been known to professional and amateur astronomers for the striking visible nebulosity that envelopes the cluster’s brightest stars, scattering their light like fog around a streetlamp.