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Pasadena, CA—The Big Bang produced lots of hydrogen and helium and a smidgen of lithium. All heavier elements found on the periodic table have been produced by stars over the last 13.7 billion years. Astronomers analyze starlight to determine the chemical makeup of stars, the origin of the elements, the ages of stars, and the evolution of galaxies and the universe. Now for the first time, astronomers have detected the presence of arsenic and selenium, neighboring elements near the middle of the periodic table, in an ancient star in the faint stellar halo that surrounds the Milky Way. Arsenic and selenium are elements at the transition from light to heavy element production, and have not been found in old stars until now.

Pasadena, CA--Astronomers have begun to blast 3 million cubic feet of rock from a mountaintop in the Chilean Andes to make room for what will be the world’s largest telescope when completed near the end of the decade.

The telescope will be located at the Carnegie Institution’s Las Campanas Observatory—one of the world’s premier astronomical sites, known for its pristine conditions and clear, dark skies. Over the next few months, more than 70 controlled blasts will break up the rock while leaving a solid bedrock foundation for the telescope and its precision scientific instruments.
 

Washington, D.C.— An international team of scientists led by Carnegie’s Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler and including the Observatories' Jeffrey Crane, Stephen Shectman, and Ian Thompson has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system and has a different makeup than our Sun, being relatively lacking in metallic elements. This discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

March 12, March 26, April 16, and April 30 2012.
Each year the Observatories organizes a series of public lectures on current astronomical topics.  These lectures are given by astronomers from the Carnegie Observatories as well as other research institutions.  The lectures are geared to the general public and are free.  More information can be found here.

Pasadena, CA— A team of scientists, including Carnegie’s Mansi M. Kasliwal, has observed the early stages of a Type Ia supernova that is only 21 million light years away from Earth--the closest of its kind discovered in 25 years. The Palomar Transient Factory team’s detection of a supernova less than half a day after it exploded will refine and challenge our understanding of these stellar phenomena. Their breakthrough observations are published December 15 in Nature.

Pasadena, CA— A team of scientists, led by Michael Rauch from the Carnegie Observatories, has discovered a distant galaxy that may help elucidate two fundamental questions of galaxy formation: How galaxies take in matter and how they give off energetic radiation. Their work will be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Pasadena, CA— Water really is everywhere. A team of astronomers have found the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe—discovered in the central regions of a distant quasar. Quasars contain massive black holes that are steadily consuming a surrounding disk of gas and dust; as it eats, the quasar spews out huge amounts of energy. The energy from this particular quasar was released some 12 billion years ago, only 1.6 billion years after the Big Bang and long before most of the stars in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy began forming.

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Pasadena, CA— Astronomers have pushed NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to it limits by finding what they believe to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe—at a distance of 13.2 billion light years, some 3% of the age of universe. This places the object roughly 150 million light years more distant than the previous record holder. The observations provide the best insights yet into the birth of the first stars and galaxies and the evolution of the universe. The research is published in the 27th January edition of Nature.

Pasadena, CA— Allan R. Sandage, Edwin Hubble’s former observing assistant and one of the most prominent astronomers of the last century, died November 13, 2010, at home in San Gabriel, California, of pancreatic cancer.

Leonard Searle, astronomer and director emeritus of Carnegie Observatories, died at his home on July 2, 2010, in Pasadena, CA, in the midst of a busy retirement that followed a long, distinguished scientific career.

Washington, D.C. At its annual May meeting, the Carnegie Institution for Science board of trustees enthusiastically endorsed the construction of the proposed Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The GMT will be the first in the next generation of astronomical observatories that will drive new scientific discoveries. The Carnegie board authorized President Richard A. Meserve to state the institution’s commitment of $59.2 million for the design, construction, and commissioning of the telescope to supplement the $19.9 million that Carnegie has already committed to the project. At this time more that 40% of the total funding required to construct the GMT has been committed by the Founding Institutions. It is the board’s hope and expectation that the other partners in the project will soon commit the remainder of the funds that will allow the telescope to be brought into service.

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Pasadena, CA— Astronomers have found the first clear evidence of a binary quasar within a pair of actively merging galaxies. Quasars are the extremely bright centers of galaxies surrounding super-massive black holes, and binary quasars are pairs of quasars bound together by gravity. Binary quasars, like other quasars, are thought to be the product of galaxy mergers. Until now, however, binary quasars have not been seen in galaxies that are unambiguously in the act of merging.  But images of a new binary quasar from the Carnegie Institution’s Magellan telescope in Chile show two distinct galaxies with “tails” produced by tidal forces from their mutual gravitational attraction.

Pasadena, CA—Astronomers, conducting the broadest survey to date of galaxies from about 800 million years after the Big Bang, have found 22 early galaxies and confirmed the age of one by its characteristic hydrogen signature at 787 million years post Big Bang. The finding is the first age-confirmation of a so-called dropout galaxy at that distant time and pinpoints when an era called the reionization epoch likely began. The research will be published in a December issue of the Astrophysical Journal.     

Pasadena, CA-The Australian government has announced that it will provide $88.4 million AUD ($72.4 million USD) to help fund the revolutionary 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) to be sited at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile’s high-altitude Atacama Desert.

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Pasadena, CA —Using information from a suite of telescopes, astronomers have discovered a mysterious, giant object that existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. Objects such as this one are dubbed extended Lyman-Alpha blobs; they are huge bodies of gas that may be precursors to galaxies. This blob was named Himiko for a legendary, mysterious Japanese queen. It stretches for 55 thousand light years, a record for that early point in time. That length is comparable to the radius of the Milky Way’s disk.

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Pasadena, CA—Evidence of star birth within a cloud of primordial gas has given astronomers a glimpse of a previously unknown mode of galaxy formation. The cloud, known as the Leo Ring, appears to lack the dark matter and heavy elements normally found in galaxies today. The unexpected discovery comes thanks to instruments aboard NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft which are sensitive to the ultraviolet radiation emitted by newly formed stars. 

Pasadena, CA-The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) Corporation is pleased to announce that nine astronomical research organizations from three continents have signed the Founders’ Agreement to construct and operate the 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in the Andes Mountains of Chile. In the United States the participating institutions are the Carnegie Institution for Science, Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, Texas A& M University, the University of Arizona, and the University of Texas at Austin. The two Australian members of the Founders group are the Australian National University and Astronomy Australia Limited. Most recently, the South Korean government has approved participation in the GMT project, with the Korean Astronomy and Space Science Institute as the representative of the Korean astronomical community.