After several years of excellent work at Las Campanas Observatory (LCO), six of our collaborators retired under a special voluntary retirement plan promoted by the Carnegie Institution for Science. To bid them farewell, on December 27, 2021, a tribute ceremony was held at the LCO offices in La Serena. The ceremony was semi-presential. In addition…
Between December 23 and January 6, the Araucaria tree located in the offices of the Las Campanas Observatory in La Serena, IV region of Chile, will be illuminated, simulating a Christmas tree as it has been traditionally done. In La Serena it is said that many children even believed that the “Viejito Pascuero” (Little Old…
Astronomer of the Universidad de Chile leads a research that presents an object selection strategy for the APOGEE-2 project, a high-resolution, near-infrared, multi-point spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way using data obtained with the du Pont telescope of the Las Campanas Observatory. Also participating in the study were Carnegie Institution for Science researchers Rachael Beaton,…
A team of scientists from the Instituto de Astrofísica de La Plata (IALP, CONICET-UNLP) managed to measure the mass of the largest and hottest star of which there is information so far in our galaxy, according to an article recently published in the American journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This was done…
During October, Las Campanas Observatory carried out several outreach activities in the context of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the first light of the Swope telescope and the month of science in Chile. One of them was a webinar called “History of LCO and The Carnegie Observatories”, held on October 14 and broadcasted…
Just as we use several bricks to create a wall, the galaxies that populate our Universe are thought to have been built from the merger of smaller ones. The “Milky Way building” is the result of this assembly process and, recently, several building blocks of our galaxy have been discovered. Smaller galaxies are expected to…
An international team of astrophysicists, led by Universidad Católica del Norte (UCN) astronomer Dr. José Fernández-Trincado, identified a new population of red giant stars with chemical anomalies in our galaxy. The researchers used data obtained with the du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and Apache Point Observatory. The Milky Way is populated by a…
“Past, present and future” was the name of the last webinar of the seminar “Astronomical Heritage of Chile”, held on October 18, 2021 through the zoom platform, with live streaming through the Youtube channel of the Las Campanas Observatory and the Institute of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Valparaiso. The seminar had three…
Las Campanas Observatory, part of the Carnegie Institution for Science, celebrates 50 years in October since the first light of its first telescope, which began operating in Chile in 1971. Since then, the Carnegie science team has been at the forefront of research on cosmology, galaxy formation and evolution, the chemical evolution of stars and…
An international group of researchers, including astronomers from the Universidad Católica del Norte have conducted the first investigation of the chemical properties of the ancient globular cluster Tonantzintla 1, also known as NGC 6380. The researchers worked with data obtained with the Irénée du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. Globular clusters are symmetric, compact…
