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…
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…
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…
