News

Pasadena, CA—Carnegie’s Eduardo Bañados led a team that found a quasar with the brightest radio emission ever observed in the early universe, due to it spewing out a jet of extremely fast-moving material.

By unanimous vote of the Carnegie Board of Trustees, Dr. Eric D. Isaacs has been appointed the 11th president of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Dr. Isaacs joins Carnegie from the University of Chicago and will succeed Interim Co-Presidents John Mulchaey and Yixian Zheng on July 2, 2018.

Pasadena, CA—Pomona College junior and returning Carnegie Observatories intern Sal Fu was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship in recognition of her academic and research success and to support her continued “academic study and research in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering.” Fu has participated in the Carnegie Summer Undergraduate Research program over the past two summers, working with staff astronomer Josh Simon studying dwarf galaxies and streams of stars surrounding our Milky Way using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Pasadena, CA— A star about 100 light years away in the Pisces constellation, GJ 9827, hosts what may be one of the most massive and dense super-Earth planets detected to date according to new research led by Carnegie’s Johanna Teske. This new information provides evidence to help astronomers better understand the process by which such planets form.

Pasadena, CA— The next generation of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V), directed by Carnegie’s Juna Kollmeier, will move forward with mapping the entire sky following a $16 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The grant will kickstart a groundbreaking all-sky spectroscopic survey for a next wave of discovery, anticipated to start in 2020.

Washington, DC— On August 17, a team of four Carnegie astronomers, Maria Drout, Ben Shappee, Josh Simon, and Tony Piro, provided the first-ever glimpse of two neutron stars colliding, opening the door to a new era of astronomy where both gravitational waves and light can be used to study the same event.

Along with colleagues at UC Santa Cruz, the team used the Swope telescope at Las Campanas Observatory to discover the light produced by the merger, pinpointing the origin of a gravitational wave signal less than 11 hours after it was detected. They also obtained the earliest spectra of the collision, a unique data set that provides exciting new information about the physics of how neutron stars destroy each other as they merge. Data they took over the following weeks revealed a glowing, red transient that is likely powered by the radioactive decay of heavy elements synthesized in merger debris. This explains a many decades old problem of where many of the heaviest elements in the Universe (such as gold, platinum, and uranium) originate.

Their discovery, named Swope Supernova Survey 2017a (or SSS17a), is published in a quartet of Science papers.

Friday, Nov. 17, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 18, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

This conference, jointly presented by The Huntington and Carnegie Observatories, marks the centennial of the completion of the 100-inch Hooker telescope on Mount Wilson, which saw first light in November 1917. The world's largest telescope of the era, the 100-inch heralded the dawn of modern astronomy. Historians, scientists, curators of science collections, and others will explore the influence of big telescopes, the significance of discoveries at Mount Wilson, the gendered nature of astronomy, and other related issues in the history of Southern California as an arena for the exploration of space.  

Pasadena, CA— Carnegie’s Benjamin Shappee is part of a team of scientists, including an Australian amateur astronomer, which discovered a new comet last week.

Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Eduardo Bañados and led by Roberto Decarli of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has discovered a new kind of galaxy which, although extremely old—formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang—creates stars more than a hundred times faster than our own Milky Way.

Pasadena, CA—Over 20 years ago, Carnegie astronomer emeritus Alan Dressler chaired the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and Beyond Committee. It has been awarded the 2017 Carl Sagan Memorial Award presented at the meeting of the American Astronautical Society March 7-9 in Greenbelt, Maryland.

This year's Astronomy Lecture Series will be held at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens on Mondays April 3rd, April 17th, May 1st, and May 15th. All lectures are free to the public, but seating is limited and a reservation is a required. For those who cannot attend, there will be live streaming available. All the details can be found at our Lecture Series web site.
Update: All tickets have been reserved, however you can still join our live webcast at the following link:  Huntington Live Stream.

Washington, DC-Renowned astrophysicist and National Medal of Science awardee Vera Rubin passed away in Princeton N.J., the evening of December 25, 2016, at the age of 88. Rubin confirmed the existence of dark matter-the invisble material that makes up more than 90% of the mass of the universe. She was a retired staff astronomer at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C.

via carnegiescience.edu

Pasadena, CA— Quasars are supermassive black holes that sit at the center of enormous galaxies, accreting matter. They shine so brightly that they are often referred to as beacons and are among the most-distant objects in the universe that we can currently study. New work from a team led by Carnegie’s Eduardo Bañados has discovered 63 new quasars from when the universe was only a billion years old. (It’s about 14 billion years old today.)

Washington, DC— Dwarf galaxies are enigmas wrapped in riddles. Although they are the smallest galaxies, they represent some of the biggest mysteries about our universe. While many dwarf galaxies surround our own Milky Way, there seem to be far too few of them compared with standard cosmological models, which raises a lot of questions about the nature of dark matter and its role in galaxy formation.

Pasadena, CA—An international team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Eric Persson, has charted the rise and fall of galaxies over 90 percent of cosmic history. Their work, which includes some of the most sensitive astronomical measurements made to date, is published by The Astrophysical Journal.  

Take a rare look inside a world-class planet finding instrument. In April, our team performed maintenance and upgrades to the Planet Finder Spectrograph, or PFS for short. PFS is an instrument that astronomers use at the Magellan Clay Telescope to find signatures of exoplanets in stellar spectra. The observations are critically dependant on precision, which relies on the stability of the instrument. The PFS team only opens the instrument every few years for maintenance and upgrades, making this an unusual event that we wanted to share.

Pasadena, CA— The Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) has announced that the Carnegie Observatories’ postdoctoral associate Rachael Beaton will receive the 2016 Robert J. Trumpler Award. In addition, the Observatories’ Carnegie-Princeton Fellow Eduardo Bañados received the Otto Hahn Medal from Germany’s Max Planck Society. Beaton’s Trumpler Ward is for a recent Ph.D. thesis “considered unusually important to astronomy.” The Otto Hahn Medal honors young researchers for outstanding scientific achievements. 

Pasadena, CA—The lightest few elements in the periodic table formed minutes after the Big Bang.  Heavier chemical elements are created by stars, either from nuclear fusion in their interiors or in catastrophic explosions.  However, scientists have disagreed for nearly 60 years about how the heaviest elements, such as gold and lead, are manufactured.  New observations of a tiny galaxy discovered last year show that these heavy elements are likely left over from rare collisions between two neutron stars. The work is published by Nature.

The new galaxy, called Reticulum II because of its location in the southern constellation Reticulum, commonly known as The Net, is one of the smallest and closest to us known.  Its proximity made it a tempting target for a team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Josh Simon, who have been studying the chemical content of nearby galaxies. 

Pasadena, CA—A team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Benjamin Shappee, Nidia Morrell, and Ian Thompson, has discovered the most-luminous supernova ever observed, called ASAS-SN-15lh. Their findings are published in Science.

Pasadena, CA – November 11, 2015 – Leading scientists, senior officials, and supporters from an international consortium of universities and research institutions are gathering on a remote mountaintop high in the Chilean Andes today to celebrate groundbreaking for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The ceremony marks the commencement of on-site construction of the telescope and its support base. The GMT is poised to become the world’s largest telescope when it begins early operations in 2021. It will produce images ten times sharper than those delivered by the Hubble Space Telescope and will address key questions in cosmology, astrophysics and the study of planets outside our solar system.

This week The Observatories will host astronomers from around the globe for the inaugural Carnegie Symposium in Honor of Leonard Searle. The topic of the meeting is "Understanding Nebular Emission in High-Redshift Galaxies: Massive Stars, Chemical Abundances and Photoionization Models."

Pasadena, CA— Type Ia supernovae are violent stellar explosions that shine as some of the brightest objects in the universe. But there are still many mysteries surrounding their origin—what kind of star system they originate in and how the explosions begin. New work from the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Mansi Kasliwal, provides strong evidence pointing toward one origin theory, called the single degenerate channel. This work is published May 21 by Nature.

Pasadena, CA— A Carnegie-based search of nearby galaxies for their oldest stars has uncovered two stars in the Sculptor dwarf galaxy that were born shortly after the galaxy formed, approximately 13 billion years ago. The unusual chemical content of the stars may have originated in a single supernova explosion from the first generation of Sculptor stars. The team, which includes Carnegie’s Josh Simon, Ian Thompson, and Stephen Shectman, will publish their work in The Astrophysical Journal on Thursday.

This year's Astronomy Lecture Series will take place at A Noise Within on March 30, April 13, April 27, and May 11. Click here for more information.

Washington, D.C.— Carnegie astronomer Mark Phillips, interim director of the Las Campanas Observatory, is one of a group of scientists being honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics.

The prize recognizes “major insights into the deepest questions of the Universe” and is being shared by two research teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, of which Phillips is a member.

Pasadena, CA—Quasars are supermassive black holes that live at the center of distant massive galaxies. They shine as the most luminous beacons in the sky across the entire electromagnetic spectrum by rapidly accreting matter into their gravitationally inescapable centers. New work from Carnegie’s Hubble Fellow Yue Shen and Luis Ho of the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University solves a quasar mystery that astronomers have been puzzling over for 20 years. Their work, published in the September 11 issue of Nature, shows that most observed quasar phenomena can be unified with two simple quantities: one that describes how efficiently the hole is being fed, and the other that reflects the viewing orientation of the astronomer.

Monday, September 29, 2014  7-9 PM, at
The Carnegie Observatories
813 Santa Barbara Street, Pasadena

AxS ("axis") is a 2-week city-wide festival produced by the Pasadena Arts Council, exploring the nexus of artistic and scientific inquiry and promoting cross-fertilization between these disciplines.  The theme of the 2014 Festival is "Curiosity" - the interplay between human curiosity, scientific investigation and artistic endeavor that also illuminates the diversity and innovation of human achievement in the 21st century.

Washington, D.C.— An international team of astronomers, including five Carnegie scientists, reports the discovery of two new planets orbiting a very old star that is near to our own Sun. One of these planets orbits the star at the right distance to allow liquid water to exist on its surface, a key ingredient to support life. Their work is published by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and available online here.

Pasadena, CA— The structures and star populations of massive galaxies appear to change as they age, but much about how these galaxies formed and evolved remains mysterious. Many of the oldest and most massive galaxies reside in clusters, enormous structures where numerous galaxies are found concentrated together. Galaxy clusters in the early universe are thought to be key to understanding the lifecycles of old galaxies, but to date astronomers have located only a handful of these rare, distant structures.

New research from a team led by Carnegie’s Andrew Newman has confirmed the presence of an unusually distant galaxy cluster, JKCS 041. It is published by The Astrophysical Journal.

Pasadena, CA— Astronomer and instrumentation expert Stephen Shectman of the Carnegie Observatories has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Shectman investigates the large-scale structure of the distribution of galaxies; searches for ancient stars; develops novel and creative astronomical instruments; and constructs large telescopes.

Pasadena, CA–The international consortium of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project has passed two major reviews and is positioned to enter the construction phase. When completed, the 25-meter GMT will have more than six times the collecting area of the largest telescopes today and ten times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Pasadena, CA—A team of researchers including Carnegie’s Mansi Kasliwal and John Mulchaey used a novel astronomical survey software system—the intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF)—to link a new stripped-envelope supernova, named iPTF13bvn, to the star from which it exploded. The iPTF team also pinpointed the first afterglow of an explosion called a gamma-ray burst that was found by the Fermi satellite. Their work will be published by Astrophysical Journal Letters in two papers led by Yi Cao and Leo Singer, both of the California Institute of Technology.

On Saturday Aug. 24th, the Stewart Observatory Mirror Lab began casting the third of seven 8.4-meter mirrors that will ultimately comprise the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). Upon completion in 2020, the GMT will be one of the largest optical telesocopes on Earth.

Pasadena, CA— Blazars are the brightest of active galactic nuclei, and many emit very high-energy gamma rays. New observations of a blazar known as PKS 1424+240 show that it is the most-distant known source of very high-energy gamma rays. But its emission spectrum appears highly unusual.
 
A team including Carnegie’s Michele Fumagalli used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to set a lower limit for the blazar's redshift (z ≥ 0.6035). An object’s redshift value is a measurement of how much the wavelength of the light from it that reaches Earth is stretched by the expansion of the Universe. Thus, it reveals the object’s age and distance. This blazar’s redshift corresponds to a distance of at least 7.4 billion light-years. Their work will be published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available online.

Pasadena, CA — Using information gathered from several telescopes, a team of astronomers, including Carnegie’s Eric Murphy, searched the sky for very rarely seen dusty starburst galaxies, formed soon after the Big Bang. These galaxies are characterized by an unusually high rate of star formation. They are much more abundant in the early Universe than previously thought. Two of those identified are among the oldest ever found, indicating that these dusty starbursts likely evolve into the most massive galaxies ever observed in the local Universe. The results are published online March 13 by Nature.
 

Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Ian Thompson have managed to improve the measurement of the distance to our nearest neighbor galaxy and, in the process, refine an astronomical calculation that helps measure the expansion of the universe. Their work is published March 7 by Nature. 

Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Daniel Kelson have set a new distance record for finding the farthest galaxy yet seen in the universe. By combining the power of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer Space Telescope, and one of nature's own natural "zoom lenses" in space, they found a galaxy whose light traveled 13.3 billion years to reach Earth. Their work will be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers, led by Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories, have used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make one of the most accurate and precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, a fundamental quantity that measures the current rate at which our universe is expanding. These results will be published in The Astrophysical Journal and are available online.

The Observatories is proud to announce that three of the 2012 Astronomy Lectures Series talks given at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens has been made available to the public via Carnegie's YouTube channel.  The audio was recorded by the Hungtington and paired with video created using the actual slides shown during the talks.  All talks can be found here.

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.

Video Press Release

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.

Video Press Release

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.

Video Press Release
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.

Video Press Release
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.