Press Releases

6 October 2003: This image of the clouds of gas and dust next to the “neck” and “body” of the Pelican Nebula was taken by the National Science Foundation’s Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ.

30 September 2003: The Optical Society of America (OSA) and The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), along with key industry partners, Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), were awarded today a $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to implement a national middle school science education program: Hands-On Optics: Making an Impact with Light (HOO).

16 September 2003: Case Western Reserve University astronomers have announced the discovery of a new galaxy, termed Andromeda VIII. The new galaxy is so widespread and transparent that astronomers did not suspect its existence until they mapped the velocity of stars thought to belong to the well-known and nearby large Andromeda spiral galaxy and found them to move independently of Andromeda.

6 August 2003: Astronomers have finally identified the progenitor star system of a Type Ia supernova. The culprit that triggered the stellar explosion is a surprisingly normal star just a few times more massive than the Sun.

9 July 2003: Astronomers have assembled the first effective model for both the shape and evolutionary history of the Owl Nebula, the well-known planetary nebula in the constellation Ursa Major.

30 June 2003: Gemini Observatory's new imaging spectrograph, without the help of adaptive optics, recently captured images that are among the sharpest ever obtained of astronomical objects from the ground.

25 June 2003: The University of Arizona and National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) will bring top scientists and world-class telescope facilities to the NASA-funded search for life on other planets, strengthening the “astro“ part of the U.S. space agency’s astrobiology program.

2 June 2003: A razor-sharp image was released today revealing new details at the heart of a famous star cluster. The thousands of swarming stars at the cluster's core were made visible by an innovative adaptive optics system called Altair that is currently being commissioned on the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i.

26 May 2003: An international team of astronomers has discovered seven extremely large circumstellar disks silhouetted against the forming stars that they surround. These new disks are 10 to 100 times larger than both our solar system and other planet-forming disks that have been imaged previously, suggesting that it may be possible for planets to form at much larger distances from their stars than previously thought.

10 May 2003: In one of the largest and most detailed celestial images ever made, the coil-shaped Helix Nebula is being unveiled today in celebration of Astronomy Day. The resulting composite picture is a seamless blend of ultra-sharp NASA Hubble Space Telescope images combined with the wide view of the Mosaic Camera on the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. The image shows a fine web of filamentary “bicycle-spoke” features embedded in the colorful red and blue gas ring, which is one of the nearest planetary nebulae to Earth.

24 April 2003: Four major research organizations have joined forces to build a world-class telescope that will survey the entire sky in a relentless search for supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, near-Earth asteroids and the mysterious energy of expansion in the Universe known as dark energy.

5 March 2003: A team of astronomers headed by Frank Winkler of Middlebury College has combined precise digital observations with simple mathematics to estimate the apparent brightness of an exploding star whose light reached Earth nearly a thousand years ago, when it produced a display that was probably the brightest stellar event witnessed in recorded human history.

4 February 2003: NASA should be assigned to lead a new research program to better determine the population and physical diversity of near-Earth objects that may collide with our planet, down to a size of 200 meters, according to the final report of a workshop on the scientific requirements for the mitigation of hazardous comets and asteroids.

13 January 2003: A team of astronomers led by Matthew Holman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and JJ Kavelaars (National Research Council of Canada) has discovered three previously unknown moons of Neptune. This boosts the number of known satellites of the gas giant to eleven. These moons are the first to be discovered orbiting Neptune since the Voyager II flyby in 1989, and the first discovered from a ground-based telescope since 1949.

8 January 2003: Astronomers have discovered a small body orbiting the Sun at the distance of Neptune whose orbit makes it the first known member of a long-sought population of objects known as Neptune Trojans.

8 January 2003: Astronomers have discovered dozens of potential stellar cocoons within the hostile environment of the Carina Nebula, including some oddballs with bulbous heads, irregular shapes and long, thin tails. Each of these objects may harbor disks of gas and dust that could one day form planetary systems.

26 November 2002: The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc., has entered into a new cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation for AURA to continue to operate the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and the National Solar Observatory (NSO) through September 30, 2007.

13 November 2002: Gemini Observatory honored Dr. Fred Gillett, a pioneer in infrared astronomy, by naming the Gemini North Telescope in his honor at ceremonies at the telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai'i, November 13, 2002.

15 October 2002: An unobtrusive arc of blue stars stretching above the iconic galaxy Centaurus A represents the lingering signature of an episode of galactic cannibalism that is surprisingly recent and, astronomically speaking, quite nearby.

10 October 2002: All U.S. astronomers will gain competitive access to the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes starting early next year via an innovative new National Science Foundation program administered by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).