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24 July 2019: Observations made with a new instrument developed for use at the 2.1-meter (84-inch) telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Kitt Peak National Observatory have led to the discovery of the fastest eclipsing white dwarf binary yet known. Clocking in with an orbital period of only 6.91 minutes, the rapidly orbiting stars are expected to be one of the strongest sources of gravitational waves detectable with LISA, the future space-based gravitational wave detector.

27 March 2019: Caught in a cosmic dance, our nearest neighbor galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, are cartwheeling and circling each other as they fall toward our galaxy, the Milky Way. The gravitational interaction between the Clouds sparks cosmic fireworks—bursts of star formation as new clusters of stars flame on. How many and what kind of star clusters have been born this way over the history of the Clouds? A new project, the Local Group Cluster Search, invites citizen scientists to help find out!

19 February 2019: The Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project re-launches this week, with a call to volunteer citizen scientists to join the search for cold worlds near the Sun. With its newly revamped online interface and equipped with twice as much data as before, the project offers new opportunities to discover planets lurking yet unseen in the outer reaches of the Solar System (e.g., Planet 9, Planet X) as well as cold nearby “failed stars” (a.k.a. brown dwarfs). The re-launch coincides with the publication of the project’s latest discovery: a record-setting white dwarf star encircled by mysterious dusty rings that challenge astronomers to rethink the long-term evolution of planetary systems.

22 January 2019: After slowly forming stars for the first few billion years of their lives, the Magellanic Clouds, near neighbors of our own Milky Way galaxy, have upped their game and are now forming new stars at a fast clip. This new insight into the history of the Clouds comes from the first detailed chemical maps made of galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

10 January 2019: An unusual supernova studied by multiple telescopes, including the SOAR telescope and other telescopes at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), is thought to herald the birth of a new black hole or neutron star, caught at the exact moment of its creation. Observations made with facilities ranging from X-rays to optical and radio wavelengths were used to understand this remarkable event. These multi-messenger observations give astronomers a rare glimpse into the physics at play during the creation of a black hole or neutron star.

8 January 2019: On the night of 9 January 2019, the V. M. Blanco 4-meter telescope at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), high in the mountains of Chile, will close the camera’s shutter on the final image from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) – a survey that has mapped 5,000 square degrees of the heavens, almost one-quarter of the southern sky. Although the survey is ending, both the camera used in the survey and the survey data itself are expected to continue to yield abundant new discoveries.

25 September 2018: A new $4.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been awarded to the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) for the development of a new “Windows on the Universe Center for Astronomy Outreach” at NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory. Located in the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope facility, an iconic structure that was once the world’s largest solar observatory, the center will provide the public with a new way to experience the cutting-edge research being carried out at Kitt Peak and NSF’s other astronomy facilities around the globe, including ground-based optical, radio, solar, and gravitational wave facilities.

12 February 2018: A new chapter opens today in the history of the 4-m Mayall telescope, the largest aperture telescope at NSF’s Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). Having completed its first 45-year-long assignment, the telescope is now poised to embark on a new mission: creating the largest 3-dimensional map of the cosmos to date. The map will help astronomers chart out the role of dark energy in the expansion history of the Universe.

10 January 2018: Where do the stars in our Galaxy come from? All the stars we see in the night-time sky belong to our Milky Way galaxy, and while most stars were likely born here, in the Milky Way, many appear to have originated in other galaxies and migrated to our shores. Tell-tale evidence comes from streams of stars created when small galaxies interact with the Milky Way. Eleven new stellar streams, discovered in data from the Dark Energy Survey, currently in progress at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), provide new evidence for this picture.

6 December 2017: Supermassive black holes lurk at the centers of many galaxies. While some — like the black hole at the center of our own Galaxy — live quiet lives, occasionally snacking on a star or two, others feed voraciously, consuming gas and stars and growing rapidly in mass.

15 November 2017: The visit of the interstellar interloper 1I/2017 U1, recently spotted streaking through the Solar System, gives the people of Earth their first chance to study up close an object from another planetary system. In a study carried out with the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Nordic Optical Telescope in the Canary Islands, astronomers find that despite its foreign origins, U1 is familiar in appearance — its size, rotation, and color are similar to that of asteroids in our Solar System. Its familiar appearance supports the long-held view that our Solar System once ejected its own flotilla of such messengers out into interstellar space.

16 October 2017: The precious elements in our Earth-bound bling, gold and platinum, are thought to have been forged in ancient fiery cataclysms, when pairs of neutron stars spiraled together and merged into black holes. A similar event, the merger of a neutron star binary, was recently detected in gravitational waves by two gravitational wave observatories (Advanced LIGO and Virgo) and at optical-infrared wavelengths by the Blanco, SOAR, and SMARTS 1.3m telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) and the Gemini South telescope on Cerro Pachón. The detected optical emission, the first optical counterpart to a gravitational wave event, confirms that binary neutron star mergers are indeed major cosmic production sites of rare heavy elements.

30 August 2017: In 2013 a small meteoroid, the size of a house, hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. The explosion shattered windows, and more than a thousand people were treated for injuries from flying debris. How many similar-sized rocks have orbits that bring them close to Earth? A new study has answered that question using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The result lends new insights into the nature and origin of small meteoroids.

11 July 2017: Astronomers studying the distant Universe have found that small star-forming galaxies were abundant when the Universe was only 800 million years old, a few percent of its present age. The results suggest that the earliest galaxies, which illuminated and ionized the Universe, formed at even earlier times.

5 June 2017: A close look at the center of a nearby galaxy has revealed a surprising connection between the galaxy and the supermassive black hole at its center. The galaxy is an extreme example of an “obscured AGN”, an accreting supermassive black hole that is deeply enshrouded in gas and dust.

17 May 2017: Astronomers using the SOAR telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory report the discovery of a spectacular extended jet from a young brown dwarf. With masses too low to sustain hydrogen fusion in their interiors, brown dwarfs occupy the mass range between stars and giant planets. While young stars are commonly found to launch jets that extend over a light year or more, this is the first jet with a similar extent detected from a brown dwarf. The result lends new insight into how substellar objects form.

20 June 2016: A team of astronomers has confirmed the existence of a young planet, only 11 million years old, that orbits very close to its star (at 0.05 AU), with an orbital period of 5.4 days. Approximately 5 times the size of the Earth, the new planet is a “super-Neptune” and the youngest such planet known. The discovery lends unique insights into the origin of planetary system architectures.

25 May 2016: Astronomers have uncovered evidence for a vast collection of young galaxies 12 billion light years away. The newly discovered “proto-cluster” of galaxies, observed when the universe was only 1.7 billion years old (12% of its present age), is one of the most massive structures known at that distance. The discovery, made using telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, has been reported in the Astrophysical Journal.

23 November 2015: An astonishing number of faint low surface brightness dwarf galaxies recently discovered in the Fornax cluster of galaxies may help to solve the long-standing cosmological mystery of “The Missing Satellites”. The discovery, made by an international team of astronomers led by Roberto Muñoz and Thomas Puzia of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). CTIO is operated by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO).

11 November 2015: A new book will give readers a behind-the-scenes look at how spectacular images of space are made by the world’s largest and most powerful telescopes. The telescopes and images of National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and Gemini Observatory are showcased in this book by long-time observer Dr. Travis Rector.