Jennifer Lotz
Director’s Message
A New Decade for Gemini Observatory Begins
Happy New Year to everyone in the Gemini Observatory community! The past year has en-
compassed a number of “firsts” and milestones for me, personally, as Gemini Director: I host-
ed my first Gemini Observatory open house at the 2019 winter American Astronomical So-
ciety meeting; visited Korea and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) for the
first time (and got some very important lessons on how to use sujeo, the super-skinny metal
Korean chopsticks); met with Argentinian astronomers for the first time in their country at
Reunión annual de la Asociación Argentina de Astronomía and at the Universidad Nacional
de La Plata; worked on the basics of Chilean Spanish (but still have a long way to go); got a
crash course on the nuances of Hawaiian politics and history; and, last but not least, kicked-
off the October launch of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) National Optical-Infrared
Astronomy Research Laboratory.
The best parts of the year were my interactions with Gemini’s global community, and learn-
ing about the fantastic scientific discoveries led by our users: observations from the Gemini
Near-InfraRed Spectrometer (GNIRS) pinned down the mass of the supermassive black
hole of a gravitationally-lensed quasar at the edge of the Universe (Fan et al., 2019); ultra-
sharp near-infrared images from Gemini’s multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) imager
GeMS/GSAOI uncovered the age of one of the oldest star clusters in our Galaxy (Kerber et
al., 2019); the visiting high-resolution spectrograph IGRINS discovered an extremely rare
molecular composition of carbon monoxide and nitrogen in the ices of Triton, Neptune’s
largest moon (Tegler et al., 2019); the Gemini Planet Imager Exoplanet Survey (GPIES) of
over 500 stars concluded its five-year run and revealed very different pathways for the for-
January 2020
GeminiFocus
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