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…
The initiative called “CRISTAL” will have nearly 150 hours and seeks to reveal what some of the most distant and earliest known galaxies are like and how they evolved into those seen in the local universe. The ALMA observatory awarded nearly 150 hours of observing time to the CRISTAL project, the first Chilean-led initiative to…
A Carnegie-led survey of exoplanet candidates identified by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanets Satellite Survey (TESS) is laying the groundwork to help astronomers understand how the Milky Way’s most common planets formed and evolved, and determine why our Solar System’s pattern of planetary orbits and sizes is so unusual. The survey is using TESS data and observations…
During sunrise on July 18-19, 2021, from the Baade telescope at Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory, Peter Senchyna (Carnegie Observatories postdoctoral researcher) and Bryce Bolin (from Caltech) observed asteroid 2020AV2. This asteroid, discovered in 2020, is the only one known to revolve around the Sun in an orbit smaller than the orbit of…
At the observatory located in the Atacama region, Minister Couve learned about the initiatives to advance in the operations phase at this stage of the pandemic and the state of construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), which will become one of the largest telescopes in the world. As part of a territorial deployment in…
A team of astronomers, including Guillermo Blanc, Head of Scientific-Technical Development at Las Campanas Observatory of the Carnegie Institution for Science, used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to complete the first census of molecular clouds in the nearby universe, revealing that contrary to previous scientific opinion, these stellar nurseries do not all look and act…
A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Alycia Weinberger and former-Carnegie postdoc Meredith MacGregor, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, spotted an extreme outburst, or flare, from the Sun’s nearest neighbor—the star Proxima Centauri. One of the telescopes used in this research was du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. Their work,…
“Navegantes del Cielo Austral” is published on the observatory’s Youtube channel and explains about astronomy in a close and playful way. It also has interpretation in Chilean sign language and subtitles in Spanish and English. Astronomy is a science that is constantly evolving. Scientists all over the world are vehemently investigating to solve many of…
A team of astronomers has discovered three brown dwarfs that make a complete rotation about once every hour, making them the fastest rotating stars of this type known to date. One of the telescopes used to confirm the finding was Baade at Las Campanas Observatory. Brown dwarfs are “failed stars”. They form like stars but…
