Astronomy Stories
Astrónomos de Las Campanas se enfrentan a la contaminación lumínica
  Washington, DC—Un grupo de astrónomos del Observatorio Las Campanas, de Carnegie, incluyendo a Mark Phillips y Guillermo Blanc, junto a Miguel Roth de la Organización...
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Las Campanas astronomers take on light pollution
Washington, DC—A group of astronomers from Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory including Mark Phillips and Guillermo Blanc, along with Miguel Roth from the Giant Magellan Telescope...
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Kit Whitten in the plate analysis room. Photo by Cynthia Hunt
Old plates, new data: Mysteries in the Observatories’ basement
Cataloging Reflections by Kit Whitten, Carnegie Observatories Library Intern It is commonly believed that when looking for valuable treasure, the best place to look is the attic—after all,...
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Carnegie Trustee and Astronomer Sandra Faber To Receive Magellanic Premium Medal
Former Carnegie fellow and current trustee Sandy Faber has been selected to receive the 2018 American Philosophical Society’s Magellanic Premium Medal.  The medal is the nation’s...
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Carnegie Intern, Pomona Junior, Receives Prestigious Goldwater Scholarship
Pasadena, CA—Pomona College junior and returning Carnegie Observatories intern Sal Fu was awarded...
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Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory celebrates astronomy in Chile
La Serena, Chile—Last week, scientists and staff from Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory volunteered for Astroday 2018 at a 170-year-old school in the nearby city of Las Serena, the...
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Called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, this galaxy-studded view represents a "deep" core sample of the universe, cutting across billions of light-years. Courtesy: NASA, ESA, and S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team
Carnegie scientists remember Stephen Hawking
In the days after the death of Stephen Hawking, some of our scientists reflected on meeting him, on his contributions to science and science communication, and his impact on humanity.  ALAN BOSS...
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Carnegie Science, Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Institution for Science, Roberto Marcos Molar
Proxima Centauri’s no good, very bad day: Flare illuminates lack of a dust ring; puts habitability of Proxima b in question
Washington, DC—A team of astronomers led by Carnegie’s Meredith MacGregor and Alycia Weinberger detected a massive stellar flare—an energetic explosion of radiation—from the...
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The Earthbound Planet Search Program
The Earthbound Planet Search Program has discovered hundreds of planets orbiting nearby stars using telescopes at Lick Observatory, Keck Observatory, the Anglo-Australian Observatory, Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory, and the ESO Paranal Observatory.  Our multi-national team has been...
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Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search
Along with Alycia Weinberger and Ian Thompson, Alan Boss has been running the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search (CAPS) program, which searches for extrasolar planets by the astrometric method, where the planet's presence is detected indirectly through the wobble of the host star around the...
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The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS Redshift Survey
The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS (CSI) survey, currently underway at the Magellan-Baade 6.5m telescope in Chile, has been specifically designed to characterize normal galaxies and their environments at a distance of about 4 billion years post Big Bang, expresses by astronomers as  z=1.5. The survey...
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Meet Carnegie Scientists
Paul Butler
While the planets in our Solar System are astonishingly diverse, all of them move around the Sun in approximately the same orbital plane, in the same direction, and primarily in circular orbits. Over the past 25 years Butler's work has focused on improving the measurement precision of stellar...
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Conel Alexander
Some 40 thousand tons of extraterrestrial material fall on Earth every year. This cosmic debris provides cosmochemist Conel Alexander with information about the formation of the Solar System, our galaxy, and perhaps the origin of life. Alexander studies meteorites to determine what went on before...
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John Mulchaey - Director
John Mulchaey is the director and the Crawford H. Greenewalt Chair of the Carnegie Observatories. He investigates groups and clusters of galaxies, elliptical galaxies, dark matter—the invisible material that makes up most of the universe—active galaxies and black holes. He is also...
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Decker French receives prestigious award for early career astronomers
Carnegie’s K. Decker French was recognized by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific with its Robert J. Trumpler Award, which is presented to a recent Ph.D. graduate “whose research is...
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Giant Magellan Telescope Organization casts fifth mirror
The Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) announced that it has initiated the casting of the fifth of seven mirrors that will form the heart of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT). The...
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Our galaxy’s most-mysterious star is even stranger than astronomers thought
Pasadena, CA— A star known by the unassuming name of KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus has been raising eyebrows both in and outside of the scientific community for the past year. In 2015 a...
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"Blue Snowball" planetary nebula, courtesy of Eric Hsiao.
The odd couple: Unusual supernova explained by unexpected stellar pairing
September 10, 2020

Pasadena, CA—An unusual stellar explosion is shining new light on the origins of a specific subgroup of Type Ia supernovae.

Called LSQ14fmg, the exploding star exhibits certain characteristics that are unlike any other supernova. For example, its brightness increases at an extremely slow rate compared to other Type Ia supernovae. Despite this, it is also one of the brightest explosions in its class.

“Type Ia supernovae are violent, fantastically bright explosions of a white dwarf—the remnant of a star that has exhausted its nuclear fuel—which is part of a binary system with another star,” said Carnegie astronomer Mark Phillips, an expert in

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Widmanstatten pattern characteristic of iron meteorites, courtesy of Peng Ni.
Iron-rich meteorites retain record of core crystallization in Solar System’s oldest planetary objects
August 3, 2020

Washington, DC— Work led by Carnegie’s Peng Ni and Anat Shahar uncovers new details about our Solar System’s oldest planetary objects, which broke apart in long-ago collisions to form iron-rich meteorites.  Their findings reveal that the distinct chemical signatures of these meteorites can be explained by the process of core crystallization in their parent bodies, deepening our understanding of the geochemistry occurring in the Solar System’s youth. They are published by Nature Geoscience.

Many of the meteorites that shot through our planet’s atmosphere and crashed on its surface were once part of larger objects that broke up at some point in our

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Phoenix Stellar Stream illustration courtesy of Geraint F. Lewis.
“Stellar archaeology” reveals remnant of ancient globular cluster that’s “the last of its kind”
July 29, 2020

Pasadena, CA—A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Ting Li and Alexander Ji discovered a stellar stream composed of the remnants of an ancient globular cluster that was torn apart by the Milky Way’s gravity 2 billion years ago, when Earth’s most-complex lifeforms were single-celled organisms. This surprising finding, published in Nature, upends conventional wisdom about how these celestial objects form.

Imagine a sphere made up of a million stars bound by gravity and orbiting a galactic core. That’s a globular cluster. The Milky Way is home to about 150 of them, which form a tenuous halo that envelops our galaxy.

But the globular cluster

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The du Pont telescope, courtesy Matias del Campo
Filling in 11 billion years of the universe’s expansion history
July 20, 2020

Pasadena, CA— Filling in the most-significant gaps in our understanding of the universe’s history, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released Sunday a comprehensive analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the cosmos ever created.

The survey, of which Carnegie is an integral member, has been one of the most successful and influential in the history of astronomy. It operates out of both Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, home of the survey’s original 2.5-meter telescope, and Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, where it uses Carnegie’s du Pont telescope.

The new results come from the extended Baryon Oscillation

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Hubble's Troublesome Constant
October 5, 2020

Nearly 100 years ago, Carnegie astronomer Edwin Hubble made two truly revolutionary discoveries: First that our Milky Way was only one of many galaxies in a vast universe, and second that the farther these galaxies were from us, the faster they appeared to be moving away from us. The ratio between these speeds and distances, which we now call the Hubble Constant, is a fundamental quantity that sets the scale for the size and age of the entire cosmos. For decades, its precise value has been a source of contention among astronomers. Even today, with the most-powerful telescopes at our disposal, tension between different groups remains. Dr. Burns will cover the history of Hubble’s

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Our Origins in Space - Kavli Prize Laureate Lecture
October 28, 2020

One of the most exciting developments in astronomy is the discovery of thousands of planets around stars other than our Sun. But how do these exoplanets form, and why are they so different from those in our own Solar System? Thanks to powerful new telescopes built in large international collaborations, astronomers are now starting to address these age-old questions scientifically.  With the new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), we can zoom in on the dusty clouds between the stars where new stars and planets are born.  Water and a surprisingly rich variety of organic materials are found. In conversation with Emmy Award-

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The Carnegie Hubble Program

The Carnegie Hubble program is an ongoing comprehensive effort that has a goal of determining the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe,  to a systematic accuracy of 2%. As part of this program, astronomers are obtaining data at the 3.6 micron wavelength using the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on Spitzer Space Telescope. The team has demonstrated that the mid-infrared period-luminosity relation for Cepheids, variable stars used to determine distances and the rate of the expansion,  at 3.6 microns is the most accurate means of measuring Cepheid distances to date. At 3.6 microns, it is possible to minimize the known remaining systematic uncertainties in the Cepheid

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The Carnegie Supernova Project

The recent discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate has profoundly affected physics. If the universe were gravity-dominated then it should be decelerating. These contrary results suggest a new form of “dark energy”—some kind of repulsive force—is driving the universe. To get a grasp of dark energy, it is extremely important that scientists get the most accurate measurements possible of Type Ia supernovae. These are specific types of exploring stars with exceptional luminosity that allow astronomers to determine distances and the acceleration rate at different distances. At the moment, the reality of the accelerating universe remains

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The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS Redshift Survey

The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS (CSI) survey, currently underway at the Magellan-Baade 6.5m telescope in Chile, has been specifically designed to characterize normal galaxies and their environments at a distance of about 4 billion years post Big Bang, expresses by astronomers as  z=1.5.

The survey selection is done using the Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy fields, which provides as close a selection by stellar mass as possible.

Using the IMACS infrared camera, the survey goal is to study galaxies down to low light magnitudes. The goal is to reduce the variance in the density of massive galaxies at these distances and times to accurately trace the evolution of the galaxy mass

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The Carnegie-Irvine Galaxy Survey

The Carnegie Irvine Galaxy Survey is obtaining high-quality optical and near-infrared images of several hundred of the brightest galaxies in the southern hemisphere sky, at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory to investigate the structural properties of galaxies. For more see    http://cgs.obs.carnegiescience.edu/CGS/Home.html
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Andrew Benson

Galacticus is not a super hero; it’s a super model used to determine the formation and evolution of the galaxies. Developed by Andrew Benson, the George Ellery Hale Distinguished Scholar in Theoretical Astrophysics, it is one of the most advanced models of galaxy formation available.

Rather than building his model around observational data, Benson’s Galacticus relies on known laws of physics and the so-called N-body problem, which predicts the motions of celestial bodies that interact gravitationally in groups. Galacticus’ now an open- source model produces results as stunning 3-D videos.

Some 80% of the matter in the universe cannot be seen. This unseen

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Johanna Teske

Johanna Teske became the first new staff member to join Carnegie’s newly named Earth and Planets Laboratory (EPL) in Washington, D.C., on September 1, 2020. She has been a NASA Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, CA, since 2018. From 2014 to 2017 she was the Carnegie Origins Postdoctoral Fellow—a joint position between Carnegie’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (now part of EPL) and the Carnegie Observatories.

Teske is interested in the diversity in exoplanet compositions and the origins of that diversity. She uses observations to estimate exoplanet interior and atmospheric compositions, and the chemical environments of their formation

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Conel Alexander

Some 40 thousand tons of extraterrestrial material fall on Earth every year. This cosmic debris provides cosmochemist Conel Alexander with information about the formation of the Solar System, our galaxy, and perhaps the origin of life.

Alexander studies meteorites to determine what went on before and during the formation of our Solar System. Meteorites are fragments of asteroids—small bodies that originated between Mars and Jupiter—and are likely the last remnants of objects that gave rise to the terrestrial planets. He is particularly interested in the analysis of chondrules, millimeter-size spherical objects that are the dominant constituent of the most primitive

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François Schweizer - Emeritus

Staff member emeritus François Schweizer studies galaxy assembly and evolution by observing nearby galaxies, particularly how collisions and mergers affect their properties. His research has added to the awareness that these events are dominant processes in shaping galaxies and determining their stellar and gaseous contents.

When nearby galaxies collide and merge they yield valuable clues about processes that occurred much more frequently in the younger, distant universe. When two gas-rich galaxies collide, their pervasive interstellar gas gets compressed, clumps into dense clouds, and fuels the sudden birth of billions of new stars and thousands of star clusters.

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