The activity, for aimed at visually impaired people, was carried out together with the Dedoscopio initiative and focused on telescopes and light pollution. Astronomy is a fascinating science in many aspects, one of them being its visual appeal. However, what seduces a large part of the population represents a limitation for those who cannot appreciate…
Last Thursday, March 25, 2021, in the context of the celebrations of Astronomy Day in Chile, the first session of the seminar “Valparaíso, Cradle of Modern Astronomy” was held, with the participation of experts in heritage and astronomy. The activity, held online, was co-organized by the Altura Patrimonio Foundation, the Senate Extension Center, the Chilean…
Dear LCO community, The La Serena/Coquimbo region has entered a lockdown to help slow the rising Covid-19 cases in the area. For this reason, we are extending the closure of the Clay telescope through April 19, 2021. We will continue night time operations of the Baade telescope during this period. Based on recommendations from the Magellan Scientific Advisory Committee,…
Dear all, Today, March 8, 2021, the Chilean Ministry of Health announced 4,733 new cases of COVID-19 in the country (positivity of 13.1%), 65 of them in the Atacama Region and 209 in the Coquimbo Region. Due to the latter, as of Thursday, March 11 at 5 am, the communes of Salamanca, Coquimbo, La Serena…
The Magellan Baade telescope at Carnegie’s Las Campanas Observatory played an important role in the discovery of the most-distant known quasar with a bright radio emission, which was announced by a Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg and European Southern Observatory-led team and published in The Astrophysical Journal. One of the fastest-growing supermassive black…
After almost 4 years of operations, last January 20, 2021 was the last night of the APOGEE-2 project, whose first light occurred in March 2017, with regular operations since April of the same year. The second stage of this project operated at the du Pont telescope at Las Campanas Observatory since its inception, but due…
The study was led by astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV and identified stars very poor in iron content in a globular cluster located in a region of the galactic bulge that is heavily obscured by interstellar dust, making it virtually invisible in the optical. Globular clusters are groupings of thousands, or even…
Astrophysicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have discovered a halo of abundant dark mass around the dwarf galaxy Tucana II, one of the most primitive in the universe, which has led them to conclude that the first galaxies were probably more massive than previously thought. The Magellan telescopes of Las Campanas Observatory were…
This process, before the first billion years of the Universe. One of the principal researchers is Dr. Leopoldo Infante, Director of Las Campanas Observatory, LCO. When the universe was about 350 million years old it was dark: there were no stars or galaxies, only neutral gas—mainly hydrogen—the residue of the Big Bang. That foggy period…
Dear all, Due to the increase of COVID-19 cases in the Coquimbo Region, we have decided to downgrade the operations phase at Las Campanas Observatory from Ops-2 (C2) to Ops-1, starting January 26, 2021. This applies both on the mountain and at the El Pino offices. Our decision to change phases follows the official indicators…
