Laura Ferrarese
Director’s Message
2017: An Exciting Year at Gemini
Is there no end to the excitement at Gemini?
Much has happened at Gemini both before and since I took on my new role as the Observatory’s
Interim Director in July 2017. One major event, reported in the October issue of GeminiFocus,
was the GW170817 gravitational wave whose signal rattled the LIGO and Virgo detectors for
almost two minutes on August 17th. The Gravitational Wave was triggered by two neutron stars
spiraling closer to each other and finally merging — the first ever of its kind. Gemini “pulled out
all the stops” and for three weeks followed up the source and helped bring it into focus, allowing
astronomers to dissect the first optical and infrared light emissions ever associated with such
an event.
Two months later we witnessed yet another exceptional event: on October 19th, the Pan-STARRS
survey detected a small, high-velocity asteroid, A/2017 U1, moving away from Earth. Nothing
unusual… if it weren’t for the fact that the visitor was from interstellar space, earning A/2017 U1
the new designation 1I/2017 U1 and the Hawaiian name of ‘Oumuamua (meaning “Scout”); at
Gemini, we observed ‘Oumuamua for three days and helped reveal its unique nature.
And there were other research “firsts” in 2017: Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph observations
at Gemini South provided the first confirmations of strong gravitational lensing systems at
galaxy- and galaxy-cluster scales (enabled by our Large and Long Program); a joint Gemini-
North/Very Large Array effort localized and identified — for the first time — the host galaxy of
a once mysterious fast radio burst (some 1 billion parsecs distant); Gemini North + GRACES data
revealed the only likely candidate known to date of a star ingesting a planet; and data from the
Gemini Near-InfraRed Spectrograph allowed astronomers to constrain the mass of the most
distant known quasar to a whooping 800 million solar masses.
January 2018 / 2017 Year in Review
GeminiFocus
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