July 29, 2020

Maunakea Observatories’ Quick Reflexes Capture Fleeting Flash

Astronomers have discovered the second-most distant confirmed short gamma-ray burst (SGRB) ever studied using two Maunakea Observatories in Hawaiʻi – W. M. Keck Observatory and the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. Observations confirm the object’s distance at 10 billion light-years away, placing it squarely in the epoch of cosmic high noon when the Universe was in its […]
June 25, 2020

Pōniuāʻena – A Quasar with a Monster Black Hole in the Early Universe

Using the UKIRT, Gemini North and Keck telescopes on Maunakea, and combining with observations from observatories in Chile (including Gemini South and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory), astronomers have identified a quasar in the distant Universe, which is powered by a black hole about one and a half billion times as massive as our Sun. This quasar, the second most distant […]
May 19, 2020

Gemini Gets Lucky and Takes a Deep Dive Into Jupiter’s Clouds

Researchers using the Gemini North Telescope, in combination with the Hubble Space Telescope and observations from the Juno probe at Jupiter itself, have collected some of the sharpest images of Jupiter ever obtained from the ground. Their observations revealed that dark spots in the famous Great Red Spot are actually gaps in the cloud cover and are not due to […]
November 4, 2019

A 3-D View of a Distant Supercluster of Galaxies

A team of astronomers have used the combination of the Subaru and Gemini telescopes on Maunakea to get a more detailed view than ever before, of a distant cluster of galaxies. Using a technique known as photometric redshift to estimate distances to astronomical objects, the astronomers created a 3-D map of the galaxy cluster CL1604, which is located 7.3 billion […]
October 23, 2019

Two Maunakea Observatories Reveal the History of our Large Galactic Neighbor

The nearest large galaxy to us – the Andromeda Galaxy – is a good place to study the history of galaxies like our own Milky Way, from the outside, without the complication of being embedded within. Two Maunakea observatories – Gemini and the Canada-France Hawaii Telescope – provided critical data for studying the motions of star clusters in the outer […]
September 20, 2019
Chad Trujillo

Former Gemini Astronomer Awarded the 2019 Paolo Farinella Prize

Former Gemini astronomer Chad Trujillo along with Scott Sheppard were recipients of the 2019 Farinella Prize awarded on September 16th in Geneva, Switzerland for their outstanding collaborative work on the observational characterisation of the Kuiper belt and the Neptune-trojan population. Trujillo, who served as a staff astronomer at Gemini North from 2003 to 2016, is currently an assistant professor in […]
August 15, 2019

Total Annihilation for Supermassive Stars

Gemini Observatory captures critical data on an exotic stellar explosion that’s challenging astronomers to rethink how the most massive stars end their lives. A renegade exploding star (known as SN 2016iet) focuses on a new breed of supernova that can utterly annihilate its parent star — leaving no remnant behind. This signature event is something astronomers had never witnessed before, […]