Announcements

18 June 2004: Astronomers using a combination of data sets from the Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak, including the NOAO Deep Wide-Field Survey (image above), have found a galaxy that formed when the Universe was just six percent of its present age, suggesting the "dark ages" of the early universe ended in a patchy, gradual process.

3 June 2004: This three-color composite image of spiral galaxy NGC 4402 shows several key lines of evidence for the galaxy being stripped bare of its star-forming material by its violent ongoing encounter with the hot gas in the center of the Virgo galaxy cluster, as NGC 4402 falls into it. Released at the AAS meeting in Denver.

26 May 2004: This image of Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT) was taken with the Mosaic I camera at the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ, on May 7, 2004. The comet will remain visible for several weeks with binoculars and small telescopes just after sunset, high in the western sky. See also NOAO Press Release 04-04.

21 May 2004: Combining images from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the WIYN Telescope on Kitt Peak, near Tucson, Ariz., this image is a color-coded picture of the archetypal starburst galaxy M82. It shows the horizontal stellar disk of the galaxy, which harbors its active star formation, and a perpendicular supergalactic wind of ionized gas powered by the energy released in the starburst. See also University of Wisconsin-Madison press release.

18 May 2004: May 18, 2004 Using a sophisticated technique called Nod & Shuffle, combined with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph, ultra-deep spectra of several hundred distant, elusive galaxies were captured. These observations by the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope help to paint a new picture of the nature and evolution of galaxies some 7 - 10 billion years ago. Multiple recent discoveries of galaxies at very high redshifts have opened a fascinating window into what happened less than a billion year after the Big Bang. However, there is a more recent time interval in the past history of the universe that has remained relatively unexplored until very recently. The so-called "redshift desert" corresponds to an era when the universe was between one-third and one-half its present age (between redshifts 1 < z <2). Relatively little is known of the galaxies in this period due to a combination of intrinsically faint galaxy spectra …

5 May 2004: These two comet images were taken a few days and half a world apart. On the left is C/2001 Q4 (NEAT), imaged on Cerro Tololo, Chile on April 30, 2004 at the Curtis Schmidt telescope. On the right is C/2002 T7 (LINEAR), imaged on April 21, 2004 during the Advanced Observing Program at Kitt Peak, near Tucson, AZ.

4 May 2004: Gemini North Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) observations have confirmed that many of the "irregular" satellites around Jupiter and Saturn share a common ancestry. All the known planets of the solar system have moons, except for Mercury and Venus. Out in the realm of the gas giants large numbers of little worlds swarm around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The "regular" satellites (often the largest and brightest) go around their planets in a prograde direction (the same direction as all the planet orbits around the Sun). They probably formed in planetocentric disks with nearly circular prograde orbits close to the equatorial plane of their planets. But the gas giants also have a surprisingly large retinue of "irregular" satellites (smaller and fainter) on highly inclined and eccentric orbits, both prograde and retrograde. Their "chaotic" orbits suggest that these small worlds formed outside circumplanetary disks and were captured by gravitational influences. Irregular satellites …

27 April 2004: The new GNIRS Integral Field Unit (IFU) arrived on Cerro Pachón (Gemini South) in February in a deceptively small package. The new IFU is about the size of a large paperback, but contains some 66 miniature optical elements. Designed and built by the University of Durham (UK), the IFU fits in the GNIRS slit slide mechanism, providing an alternative input "aperture" to the variety of traditional slit masks that feed the long-slit and cross-dispersed configurations of the instrument. With the IFU in the optical path, a 2-dimensional input field of roughly 3” x 5” is divided into 21 slices of 0.15” x 4.9” each. Then these are arranged end-to-end to form a pseudo-slit that is dispersed by one of the spectrograph's three gratings as if it was a normal long-slit. This gives GNIRS the ability to form spectra of each 0.15” x 0.15” sample over the entire field without gaps. …

15 April 2004: Sitting on Cerro Pachón, a few hundred meters from the 8-m Gemini South telescope, and within view of NOAO’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, the SOuthern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) telescope was dedicated on April 17, and is expected to begin routine science operation in late 2004. This 4.1-meter aperture telescope, funded by a partnership between the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO), the country of Brazil, Michigan State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is designed to produce the best quality images of any observatory in its class in the world.

12 April 2004: A team of Brazilian and French astronomers led by C. Mendes de Oliveira has discovered four surprisingly metal-rich HII regions and associated clusters of hot young stars in an otherwise empty region of intergalactic space near the galaxy group called Stephan's Quintet. This collection of interacting galaxies (which lies about 280 million light-years away from us) is spreading clouds of gas and newborn stars across space. The newly discovered HII regions lie more than 80,000 light-years away from the center of action. Their relative youth and lack of apparent connection to the star-forming regions in the nearby quintet of galaxies raise questions about the sequence of events leading to their formation. A team of Brazilian and French astronomers led by C. Mendes de Oliveira has discovered four surprisingly metal-rich HII regions and associated clusters of hot young stars in an otherwise empty region of intergalactic space near the galaxy group …

22 March 2004: This superb new image of a stellar nursery in the Large Magellanic Cloud named Henize 206 combines data from the Spitzer Space Telescope with visible imaging from the University of Michigan/CTIO Heber D. Curtis Schmidt telescope at NOAO’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile as part of the Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (C. Smith, et. al.).

11 March 2004: As GNIRS nears first-science, NOAO is keen to see the powerful capabilities of GNIRS exploited for major scientific initiatives. Hence, NOAO is conducting a pilot program to enable observations with high scientific potential that require significant blocks of time with GNIRS on Gemini South (15 to 20 nights over the next two to three years). Find out more at the GNIRS Key Science Opportunity Webcast, Tuesday, March 16 at 10:00am MST.

8 March 2004: The GLARE (Gemini Lyman Alpha at Reionisation Era) team, an international group of astronomers using Gemini to study the early universe, has just discovered a surprisingly large number (three) very high redshift galaxies ( z = 5.83, 5.79 and 5.94) in a same region of the southern GOODS field. Two of the Lyman alpha emitters measured are the faintest of any previous spectroscopic study. The objects are red (i' - z') > 1.3 and the faintest one has a z' magnitude of 27.15. This finding suggests the existence of large-scale structure at this redshift. This field is very close to the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (UDF), a small portion of sky in the southern hemisphere recently imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. The UDF is the deepest imaging ever done of a region in the sky. The completed survey and the images are being released by the Space Telescope Science Institute. …

3 March 2004: The March 2004 edition of the Newsletter features news about the Adaptive Optics Development Program, progress reports from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the AURA New Initiatives Office, and information on preparing observing proposals for 2004B.

25 February 2004: A Canadian/Gemini team led by Tim Davidge (Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics) used the ALTAIR adaptive optics system with the Near Infrared Imager (NIRI) on the Frederick C. Gillett Gemini North Telescope to probe the red stellar content in the starburst galaxy M-82. The field studied is at a projected distance of 1 kiloparsec above the disk plane of the galaxy. This amorphous, nearly edge-on galaxy is the third brightest member of a nearby collection of galaxies called the M-81 group which is located about 12 million light-years from our Galaxy. The interactions of galaxies in the M-81 group spur bursts of star formation in its members and M-82 appears to now be experiencing such a violent outburst. This activity in the disk of M-82 appears to drive a bipolar galactic wind that feeds gas to the outer regions of the galaxy. This work indicates that recent star formation in M-82 …

2 February 2004: Wide-field telescope observations from the CTIO Blanco 4-meter telescope of the remote and therefore early Universe, looking back to a time when it was a fifth of its present age (redshift = 2.38), have revealed an enormous string of galaxies about 300 million light-years long. This new structure defies current models of how the Universe evolved, which can’t explain how a string this big could have formed so early.

21 January 2004: Trailing 200,000-light-year-long streamers of seething gas, a galaxy that was once like our Milky Way is being shredded as it plunges at 4.5 million miles per hour through the heart of a distant cluster of galaxies. These findings use data from the Mayall 4-meter and Gemini Telescopes.

14 January 2004: The mirror for the SOAR 4-meter telescope arrived safely on Cerro Pachón in Chile on the afternoon of 9 January 2004 to the great excitement of the SOAR project team, who will now prepare the optics system for first light. Dedication of the telescope is planned for mid-April.

5 January 2004: Why are some galaxies brighter than others? Bright galaxies where stars are forming may outshine dimmer, more massive galaxies. In all previous surveys of the “Redshift Desert,” the brighter star-forming galaxies were the only type bright enough to be sampled. The Gemini Deep Deep Survey (GDDS) was able to sample the dimmer, more massive galaxies and provide a better representation of the galaxies at this epoch of the Universe. The GDDS results revealed that there is a greater abundance of these more massive and older galaxies than expected from current models when the Universe was only 20-40% of its current age.

23 December 2003: The staff of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory wishes you all the best this holiday season.