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…
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…
