U of T researchers capture image of planet orbiting distant star

September 15, 2008 - CBC
Planet-hunting astronomers at the University of Toronto say they have taken a picture of a rare sight — a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system.

Astronomers David Lafrenicre, Ray Jayawardhana and Marten van Kerkwijk made their finding after doing a survey of 80 stars taken using the Gemini North telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Their findings, which have been submitted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters, have been posted online on Cornell University's arXiv website.
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1843 Stellar Eruption May Be New Type Of Star Explosion

September 10, 2008 - ScienceDaily
Eta Carinae, the galaxy's biggest, brightest and perhaps most studied star after the sun, has been keeping a secret: Its giant outbursts appear to be driven by an entirely new type of stellar explosion that is fainter than a typical supernova and does not destroy the star.
Reporting in the Sept. 11 issue of Nature, University of California, Berkeley, astronomer Nathan Smith proposes that Eta Carinae's historic 1843 outburst was, in fact, an explosion that produced a fast blast wave similar to, but less energetic than, a real supernova. This well-documented event in our own Milky Way Galaxy is probably related to a class of faint stellar explosions in other galaxies recognized in recent years by telescopes searching for extragalactic supernovae.
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Smith's recent observations using the international Gemini South 8-meter telescope and the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile reveal something new: Extremely fast filaments of gas moving five times faster than the debris in the Homunculus nebula were propelled away from Eta Carinae in the same event. The amount of mass in the relatively slow-moving Homunculus was already at the edge of plausibility in terms of what an extreme stellar wind could do physically, Smith said. The much faster and more energetic material he discovered poses even harsher difficulties for current theories.
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Brightest Stellar Explosion Heralds New Type Of Long-distance Astronomy

September 10, 2008 - ScienceDaily
A flash of light that blinded even small telescopes six months ago was the brightest astronomical explosion ever observed - visible to the naked eye despite originating halfway across the universe.
The gamma-ray burst, catalogued as GRB 080319B, was the result of a massive star's explosion 7.5 billion years ago that sent a pencil-beam of intense light on a direct collision course for Earth. It is the only known gamma-ray burst to have had a visible component bright enough to see with the naked eye.
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The Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT) at Lick Observatory also followed the fading afterglow of the burst, as did the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Bloom and his colleagues combined these observations with Swift data and Pi of the Sky images to complete their analysis.
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Astronomers Discover Missing Link For Origin Of Comets

September 9, 2008 - ScienceDaily
An international team of scientists that includes University of British Columbia astronomer Brett Gladman has found an unusual object whose backward and tilted orbit around the Sun may clarify the origins of certain comets.
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The international team has been carrying out a targeted search for objects with highly tilted orbits. Their discovery was made using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii, with follow-up observations provided by the MMT telescope in Arizona, the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) four-metre telescope in Chile, and the Gemini South telescope, also in Chile, in which Canada is a partner.
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'Supernova impostor' begins to dim unexpectedly

August 7, 2008 - NewScientist

Astronomers have detected signs of a clockwork-like dimming of the bright star Eta Carinae months earlier than expected, although they can't yet explain why. They suspect the dimming is caused by a hidden stellar companion that disrupts Eta Carinae whenever it comes near.
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The next event is set to occur at the beginning of January 2009, but astronomers report they have already caught the first glimpse of new activity using the Gemini Observatory in Chile.
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The Colliding Spiral Galaxies of Arp 271

July 21, 2008 - APoD
Explanation: What will become of these galaxies? Spiral galaxies NGC 5426 and NGC 5427 are passing dangerously close to each other, but each is likely to survive this collision. Most frequently when galaxies collide, a large galaxy eats a much smaller galaxy. In this case, however, the two galaxies are quite similar, each being a sprawling spiral with expansive arms and a compact core. As the galaxies advance over the next tens of millions of years, their component stars are unlikely to collide, although new stars will form in the bunching of gas caused by gravitational tides. Close inspection of the above image taken by the 8-meter Gemini-South Telescope in Chile shows a bridge of material momentarily connecting the two giants. Known collectively as Arp 271, the interacting pair spans about 130,000 light years and lies about 90 million light-years away toward the constellation of Virgo. Quite possibly, our Milky Way Galaxy will undergo a similar collision with the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy in about five billion years.

eGZeLENS — The extensive Galaxy Zoo LENsing Survey

July 12, 2008 - Aprajita's Blog

... Some of you may have had some interaction with me on the GalaxyZoo Forum on the topic of Gravitational Lenses. My name is Aprajita Verma and I am a researcher at the University of Oxford. I primarily work on galaxies at high redshift trying to understand their nature as we see them, how they began their lives and postulating about their fate.

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As an initial attempt, we applied for observing time for IFS observations with the 8m Gemini Telescope in Chile (see www.gemini.edu). This is one of the world’s largest telescope with a twin telescope (hence the name Gemini) in the northern hemisphere on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
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