Announcements 2012

16 February 2012: Small icy bodies are the remnant leftovers from the formation of planets in the Solar System. Ongoing observations made with Gemini of an extremely red pair of such Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in an orbiting binary system offer an indirect glimpse into the past. Scott Sheppard (Carnegie Institution of Washington), Darin Ragozzine (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics), and Chad Trujillo (Gemini Observatory) obtained nearly monthly observations of the pair, named 2007 TY430, to yield precise measurements of their orbital motion. Uniquely, compared with other Kuiper Belt binaries, this pair’s current mutual orbit is likely primordial, unchanged since the formation of the system. The primordial orbit reveals the binary’s formation mechanism, and therefore provides hints of past conditions during the formation of the Solar System itself. The research team concludes that this system may have formed in a more complex interaction involving yet another body. The composition of the bodies’ ultra-red material …

9 February 2012: The image above is from the Ground-based System Roadmap Committee’s summary of the results from their November 2011 survey of the community’s use of the U.S. System of O/IR facilities. Shown are the US telescopes used by more than 3% of the approximate 1000 U.S. based survey respondents. The size of each ellipse represents the number of users, while the thickness of the lines between telescopes is proportional to the number of common users.

26 January 2012: FLAMINGOS-2, the Gemini near-infrared imager and long-slit and multi-object spectrograph, is undergoing commissioning on the Gemini South telescope. We now invite the Gemini community to propose System Verification (SV) science programs for the imaging and long-slit spectroscopy modes. The deadline for receipt of all proposals is Monday February 6, 2012, 23:59 UT. Approximately 40 hours of telescope time is available for these near-infrared imaging and long-slit spectroscopy programs. The observations will be executed during bright-time during the first half of March, 2012. System Verification will provide an end-to-end test of the new FLAMINGOS-2 instrument, from the proposal process to the delivery of the data, in advance of offering the new capability to the community for general use. Therefore, it is a "shared risk" observing mode, and incurs responsibility on the successful proposers to provide feedback to the observatory in a timely fashion. SV data also have a shortened proprietary period. …

25 January 2012: Results from the Gemini Cluster Astrophysics Spectroscopic Survey (GCLASS) reveal that galaxies at a redshift of about one have at least two reasons for the curtailment of star formation. In a paper accepted in The Astrophysical Journal lead author Adam Muzzin and collaborators conclude that both mass and environment play a role in determining when a galaxy’s star formation is snuffed out. Does galaxy formation depend mostly on nature or nurture? In other words, is it primarily a self-regulated process, controlled by properties of the galaxies themselves such as their total stellar mass (i.e., “nature”), or is controlled by processes external to the galaxies such as the environment they live in (i.e., “nurture”)? In the nearby universe we know that both factors are important but at redshifts z ~ 1, when the universe was only ~40% of its current age and large-scale environments were just in the process of forming, …

12 January 2012: On January 9 and 10, the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Subra Suresh visited NSF optical astronomy facilities in Northern Chile. The NSF group included Dr. Ed Seidel (head of Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate) and Dr. Anne-Marie Schmoltner who is a program manager in the NSF International Science and Engineering Office.

6 January 2012: Greg Derylo (Fermilab) confirms that the 72-CCD focal plane of the Dark Energy Camera suffered no mechanical trauma during its recent journey from Chicago to Tololo.