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  • 21 Aug, 2019

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Cerro Tololo Observatory
The Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) is an astronomical observatory located on the summit of Mt. Cerro Tololo in the Coquimbo Region of northern Chile, with additional facilities located on Mt. Cerro Pachón about 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) to the southeast. It is approximately 80 kilometres (50 mi) east of La Serena, where support facilities are located. The principal telescopes at CTIO are the 4 m Víctor M. Blanco Telescope, named after Puerto Rican astronomer Víctor Manuel Blanco, and the 4.1 m Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope, which is situated on Cerro Pachón. Other telescopes on Cerro Tololo include the 1.5 m, 1.3 m, 1.0 m, and 0.9 m telescopes operated by the SMARTS consortium. CTIO also hosts other research projects, such as PROMPT, WHAM, and LCOGTN, providing a platform for access to the southern hemisphere for U.S. and worldwide scientific research.

History

In 1959, German astronomer Jürgen Stock arrived in Santiago to look for the optimum site for an observatory, working on behalf of the Yerkes Observatory by the University of Chicago under Gerard Kuiper. He went to the semi-arid region of Coquimbo, South of the Atacama Desert, and climbed numerous mountains, carrying a Danjon telescope and an interferometer to determine visibility and accurately measure the wavelength of light. He did not have a barometer to do meteorological forecasting and learnt from muleteers to observe animal behavior, like condor accumulations, for weather changes.

The site for the Inter-American Observatory on Mt. Cerro Tololo was identified by a team of scientists from Chile and the United States in 1959, and it was selected in 1962. Construction began in 1963 with Stock as the first director, and regular astronomical observations commenced in 1965.

In 1974, construction of large buildings on Cerro Tololo ended with the completion of the Víctor Blanco Telescope, but smaller facilities have been built since then. Cerro Pachón is still under development, with two large telescopes (Gemini South and SOAR) inaugurated since 2000, and one in the final stages of construction as of 2023 (the Vera C. Rubin Observatory)

Organization

CTIO is one of two observatories managed by NOIRLab, the other being Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO) near Tucson, Arizona. NOIRLab is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), which owns the property around the two peaks in Chile and at the headquarters in La Serena, Chile. AURA also operates the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Gemini Observatory. The 8.1 m (320 in) Gemini South Telescope located on Cerro Pachón is managed by AURA separately from CTIO for an international consortium. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the funding agency for NOIRLab.

The Small and Medium Research Telescope System (SMARTS) is a consortium formed in 2001 after NOAO, the predecessor to NOIRLab, announced it would no longer support anything smaller than two meters at CTIO. The member institutions of SMARTS now fund and manage observing time on four telescopes that fit that definition. Access has also been purchased by individual scientists. SMARTS contracts with NOIRLab to maintain the telescopes it controls at CTIO, and NOIRLab retains the right to 25% of the observing time, and Chilean scientists retain 10%. SMARTS began managing telescopes in 2003.

CTIOPI is the Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory Parallax Investigation. It began in 1999 and uses two telescopes at Cerro Tololo, the SMARTS 1.5 m reflector and the SMARTS 0.9 m reflector. The purpose of CTIOPI is to discover nearby red, white, and brown dwarfs that lurk unidentified in the solar neighborhood. The goal is to discover 300 new southern star systems within 25 parsecs by determining trigonometric parallaxes accurate to 3 milliarcseconds.

Telescopes

Telescopes and other facilities on the summit of Cerro Tololo

SMARTS telescopes

From left to right: the UBC Southern Observatory, the SMARTS 1.0-meter Telescope, the Curtis Schmidt Telescope, the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope, the SMARTS 1.5-meter Telescope and the SMARTS 0.9-meter Telescope

Tenant telescopes

A view of the entire facility

Former telescopes

Future telescopes

Other scientific projects

Discoveries

On the morning of Saturday, December 7, 2013, Luis González, a research assistant at the University of Chile, discovered what would later be confirmed as a supernova by José Maza, an astronomer at University of Chile and a researcher for CATA (Centro de Astrofísica y Tecnologías Afines or “Centre for Astrophysics and Related Technologies”). The supernova is the first discovery to be made by the CATA 500, a robotic telescope designed and operated by a Chilean team located in Santiago, approximately 500 kilometres to the south. It is part of the GLORIA project, which provides open access to astronomers from around the world to a network of remotely operated robotic telescopes. The new supernova lies in the galaxy ESO 365-G16, located 370 million light years from Earth, and has a mass eight times that of the Sun.

Gomez's Hamburger, believed to be a young star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk, was discovered in 1985 on sky photographs obtained by Arturo Gomez, support technical staff at the Observatory.

A program of NOIRLab has published a mammoth survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way.

See also

References

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