Press Releases 2023

1 March 2023: The tattered shell of the first-ever historically recorded supernova was captured by the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera, which is mounted on the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. RCW 86’s ring of debris is all that remains of a white-dwarf star that exploded more than 1800 years ago, when it was recorded by Chinese stargazers as a ‘guest star’.

23 February 2023: The largest two-dimensional map of the sky ever made has grown even larger with the tenth data release from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys — a monumental six-year survey covering nearly half the sky. This new data release adds increased sky and wavelength coverage to the already completed surveys made with data from NSF’s NOIRLab telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

16 February 2023: Journey Through the Universe — a partnership among NSF’s NOIRLab/Gemini, the Hawaiʻi Department of Education Hilo-Waiākea Complex Area, and the TMT International Observatory — returns to its in-person format to share with Hawai‘i students the wonders of the Universe and awareness of careers in science and technology. This year’s exciting program includes classroom presentations, career panels, a teacher workshop and more!

8 February 2023: A team of researchers led by astronomers at NSF’s NOIRLab has uncovered striking new evidence for a mass migration of stars into the Andromeda Galaxy. Intricate patterns in the motions of stars reveal an immigration history very similar to that of the Milky Way. The new results were obtained with the DOE’s Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument on the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab.

1 February 2023: Astronomers using data from the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF's NOIRLab, have made the first confirmed detection of a star system that will one day form a kilonova — the ultra-powerful, gold-producing explosion created by merging neutron stars. These systems are so phenomenally rare that only about 10 such systems are thought to exist in the entire Milky Way.

19 January 2023: A startling analysis from Globe at Night — a citizen science program run by NSF’s NOIRLab — concludes that stars are disappearing from human sight at an astonishing rate. The study finds that, to human eyes, artificial lighting has dulled the night sky more rapidly than indicated by satellite measurements. The study published in the journal Science showcases the unique contributions that citizen scientists can make in essential fields of research.

18 January 2023: Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.