NYT_Courting the Sirens of the Southern Sky – Marcos Zegers

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Assignment for The New York Times in Las Campanas Observatory, La Serena , Chile 2022

The Magellan Telescopes at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Oservatory in Chile.

Arlin Cortes and Natalie Ulloa work at Las Campanas Observatory on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s fifth generation led by Carnegie astronomer Juna Kollmeier. They are involved in the project’s Milky Way Mapper and Black Hole Mapper efforts using the Irénée du Pont telescope. The initiative aims to revolutionize how scientists understand the evolution of galaxies–including our own Milky Way–and the supermassive black holes that sit at their centers.

The Swope telescope at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Oservatory in Chile. On this night, it was used by Virginia Tech first-year graduate student Cassie Stevens to study young supernovae in order to better understand the progenitor systems that give birth to these phenomena. New instruments can extend the capabiities of older telescopes like Swope.

Looking inside the Local Volume Mapper, a just-completed new facility at Las Campanas Observatory. Part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s fifth generation, it will record 4,000 colors for every point in the sky using four telescopes and 1,944 fibers, each the width of a human hair. This will enable astronomers to understand how galaxies form by measuring distances, velocities, composition, and sources of ionizing radioation in the interstellar gas disbursed between stars. The interactions between this gas and the stars within a galaxy shape its evolution.

North-facing view of the Andes Mountains from the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

Excavation site for the foundations of the Giant Magellan Telescope’s enclosure. Once completed, the telescope will have 10 times the light-collecting area and four-times the spatial resolution of the James Webb Space Telescope.

The primary and tertiary mirrors of the Magellan Baade telescope at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.