Announcements

ZTF Spots Asteroid with Shortest Year

Project News • July 8th, 2019

Astronomers have spotted an unusual asteroid with the shortest "year" known for any asteroid. The rocky body, dubbed 2019 LF6, is about a kilometer in size and circles the sun roughly every 151 days. In its orbit, the asteroid swings out beyond Venus and, at times, comes closer in than Mercury,...

Exoplanet Count Hits 4,000

Project News • June 13th, 2019

NASA's exoplanet counter ticked up to 4,000, then passed it by three, with 31 new discoveries from NASA's Exoplanet Archive.

Public Data Release 1

Project News • May 8th, 2019

The first public data release of the Zwicky Transient Facility (#ZTF) is out! This release includes data products from the public portion of the survey spanning March to December 2018. Products include ~3.4 million single-exposure images, ~102,000 co-added images, accompanying source catalog...

2,700 Pages Later, a Space Mission Is Born

Project News • April 23rd, 2019

On February 13, 2019, Caltech's James (Jamie) Bock sat down with NASA's Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, to receive some good news: NASA had selected the space mission proposal he had been working on laboriously for more than six years.

NEOWISE Celebrates Five Years of Asteroid Data

Project News • April 15th, 2019

NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission released its fifth year of survey data on April 11, 2019. The five years of NEOWISE data have significantly advanced scientists' knowledge of asteroids and comets in the solar system, as well as the stars and galaxies...

NEOWISE 2019 Data Release

Project News • April 11th, 2019

The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) and IPAC at the California Institute of Technology announce the NEOWISE 2019 Data Release. The 2019 Data Release includes all data acquired during the fifth year of the NEOWISE Reactivation mission, 13 December 2017 to 13...

NASA Selects Caltech-led SPHEREx Space Mission

Project News • February 13th, 2019

NASA has selected a new Caltech-led space mission that will help astronomers understand both how our universe evolved and how common the ingredients for life are in our galaxy's planetary systems.

Zwicky Transient Facility Nabs Several Supernovae a Night

Project News • February 7th, 2019

The results are rolling in from Caltech's newest state-of-the-art sky-surveying camera, which began operations at the Palomar Observatory in March 2018. Called the Zwicky Transient Facility, or ZTF, the new instrument has so far discovered 50 small near-Earth asteroids and more than 1,100...

Astronomers Find Clues to the Origins of Exploding Dead Stars

Project News • February 7th, 2019

Dying stars known as Type Ia supernovae are often referred to as standard candles because they all emit the same, well-known amount of light when they explode and can therefore be used to measure distances in the universe. GROWTH astronomers have now observed a very peculiar Type Ia supernova...

Asteroid from ‘Rare Species’ Sighted in the Cosmic Wild

Project News • February 5th, 2019

Astronomers have discovered an asteroid looping through the inner solar system on an exotic orbit. The unusual object is among the first asteroids ever found whose orbit is confined almost entirely within the orbit of Venus. The asteroid's existence hints at potentially significant numbers of...