The Carnegie-Spitzer-IMACS (CSI) survey, currently underway at the Magellan-Baade 6.5m telescope in Chile, has been specifically designed to characterize normal galaxies and their environments at a distance of about 4 billion years post Big Bang, expresses by astronomers as  z=1.5.

The survey selection is done using the Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy fields, which provides as close a selection by stellar mass as possible.

Using the IMACS infrared camera, the survey goal is to study galaxies down to low light magnitudes. The goal is to reduce the variance in the density of massive galaxies at these distances and times to accurately trace the evolution of the galaxy mass function to a time with the universe was a third of its current age. The goal is to obtain data for over 200,000 galaxies. With this level of accuracy, this program will be able to assemble a picture of how galaxies have evolved as functions of both mass and environment. For more see http://csi.obs.carnegiescience.edu/

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SDSS/NRAO/ASIAA

Scientific Area: 
Astronomy
Reference to Person: 
Daniel Kelson

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Carnegie Science, Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Institution for Science, ASAS-SN
Supernova-hunting team finds comet with aid of amateur astronomer
July 28, 2017

Pasadena, CA— Carnegie’s Benjamin Shappee is part of a team of scientists, including an Australian amateur astronomer, which discovered a new comet last week.

Called the All Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), the international collaboration, which is headquartered at the Ohio State University, uses a network of eight 14-centimeter telescopes around the world to scan the visible sky every two or three nights looking for very bright supernovae.

But this time out they found something else—a comet. 

Jose Prieto, a former Carnegie postdoc now a professor at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, was the first ASAS-SN team member to notice the bright, moving

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Carnegie Science, Carnegie Institution, Carnegie Institution for Science,
The Moon needs no introduction ... Carnegie's lunar surface research history
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"The Moon needs no introduction ... To the layman, not versed in astrophysics, the Moon is the most-conspicuous object in the night sky and the rival of all heavenly objects, even including the Sun itself" wrote Carnegie's F.E. Wright in a poetic 1935 paper about the challenges of studying the lunar surface, which was written when the idea of sending humans there was beyond the imagination.

Reporting on the work of a Committee on Study of the Surface Features of the Moon, Wright laid out the challenges of approaching lunar research using the standard techniques employed by geologists of the time—food for thought on the anniversary of the 1969 Moon landing.  

"The observer

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Carnegie Science, Carnegie Institution for Science, Carnegie Institution, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
Discovered: fast-growing galaxies from early universe
May 24, 2017

Pasadena, CA— A team of astronomers including Carnegie’s Eduardo Bañados and led by Roberto Decarli of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has discovered a new kind of galaxy which, although extremely old—formed less than a billion years after the Big Bang—creates stars more than a hundred times faster than our own Milky Way.

Their findings are published by Nature.

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After first observing these galaxies a few years ago, astronomers proposed that they must have been created from hyper-

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Carnegie Trustee Sandy Faber Awarded Gruber Prize
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Former Carnegie fellow and current trustee, astronomer Sandra Faber, has been awarded the 2017 Gruber Foundation Cosmology Prize. She was awarded the lifetime achievement award for “her groundbreaking studies of the structure, dynamics, and evolution of galaxies.” Her work provided the impetus to study dark matter, the invisible material that makes up most of the mass of the universe, in addition to  “ the recognition that black holes reside at the heart of most large galaxies."

Faber also has a long history of contributing to  innovative telescope technology, and she has “aided and inspired the work of astronomers and cosmologists worldwide.”

The prize will be awarded this

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Vera Rubin Fellowship

The fund supports a postdoctoral fellowship in astronomy that rotates between the Carnegie Science departments of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C., and the Observatories in Pasadena California. 
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The Earthbound Planet Search Program

The Earthbound Planet Search Program has discovered hundreds of planets orbiting nearby stars using telescopes at Lick Observatory, Keck Observatory, the Anglo-Australian Observatory, Carnegie's Las Campanas Observatory, and the ESO Paranal Observatory.  Our multi-national team has been collecting data for 30 years, using the Precision Doppler technique.  Highlights of this program include the detection of five of the first six exoplanets, the first eccentric planet, the first multiple planet system, the first sub-Saturn mass planet, the first sub-Neptune mass planet, the first terrestrial mass planet, and the first transit planet.Over the course of 30 years we have improved the

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The Giant Magellan Telescope will be one member of the next class of super giant earth-based telescopes that promises to revolutionize our view and understanding of the universe. It will be constructed in the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Commissioning of the telescope is scheduled to begin in 2021.

The GMT has a unique design that offers several advantages. It is a segmented mirror telescope that employs seven of today’s largest stiff monolith mirrors as segments. Six off-axis 8.4 meter or 27-foot segments surround a central on-axis segment, forming a single optical surface 24.5 meters, or 80 feet, in diameter with a total collecting area of 368 square meters. The GMT will

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Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search

Along with Alycia Weinberger and Ian Thompson, Alan Boss has been running the Carnegie Astrometric Planet Search (CAPS) program, which searches for extrasolar planets by the astrometric method, where the planet's presence is detected indirectly through the wobble of the host star around the center of mass of the system. With over eight years of CAPSCam data, they are beginning to see likely true astrometric wobbles beginning to appear. The CAPSCam planet search effort is on the verge of yielding a harvest of astrometrically discovered planets, as well as accurate parallactic distances to many young stars and M dwarfs. For more see  http://instrumentation.obs.carnegiescience.edu/ccd/caps.

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Guillermo Blanc

Guillermo Blanc wants to understand the processes by which galaxies form and evolve over the course of the history of the universe. He studies local galaxies in the “present day” universe as well as very distant and therefore older galaxies to observe the early epochs of galaxy evolution. Blanc conducts a series of research projects on the properties of young and distant galaxies, the large-scale structure of the universe, the nature of Dark Energy—the mysterious repulsive force, the process of star formation at galactic scales, and the measurement of chemical abundances in galaxies.

To conduct this work, he takes a multi-wavelength approach including observations in the UV,

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Peter van Keken

Peter van Keken studies the thermal and chemical evolution of the Earth. In particularly he looks at the causes and consequences of plate tectonics; element modeling of mantle convection,  and the dynamics of subduction zones--locations where one tectonic plate slides under another. He also studies mantle plumes; the integration of geodynamics with seismology; geochemistry and mineral physics. He uses parallel computing and scientific visualization in this work.

He received his BS and Ph D from the University of Utrecht in The Netherlands. Prior to joining Carnegie he was on the faculty of the University of Michigan.
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Peter Driscoll

Peter Driscoll studies the evolution of Earth’s core and magnetic field including magnetic pole reversal. Over the last 20 million or so years, the north and south magnetic poles on Earth have reversed about every 200,000, to 300,000 years and is now long overdue. He also investigates the Earth’s inner core structure; core-mantle coupling; tectonic-volatile cycling; orbital migration—how Earth’s orbit moves—and tidal dissipation—the dissipation of tidal forces between two closely orbiting bodies. He is also interested in planetary interiors, dynamos, upper planetary atmospheres and exoplanets—planets orbiting other stars. He uses large-scale numerical simulations in much of his research

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Andrew Newman

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