December 2005 The Submillimeter Array Mauna Kea, Hawai'i SMA Brochure

October 04, 2005 It Takes Three Smithsonian Observatories To Decipher One Mystery Object News Release In an exercise that demonstrates the power of a multiwavelength investigation using diverse facilities, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have deciphered the true nature of a mysterious object hiding inside a dark cosmic cloud. They found that the cloud, once thought to be featureless, contains a baby star, or possibly a failed star known as a "brown dwarf," that is still forming within its dusty cocoon.

September 19, 2005 First Baby Photo of Stellar Twins News Release Newborn stars are difficult to photograph. They tend to hide in the nebulous stellar nurseries where they formed, enshrouded by thick layers of dust. Now, Smithsonian astronomer T.K. Sridharan (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and his colleagues have photographed a pair of stellar twins in infrared light, which penetrates the dust. And these babies are whoppers, weighing several times the mass of the Sun.

August 31, 2005 How to Build a Big Star News Release "In the past, theorists have had trouble modeling the formation of high-mass stars and there has been an ongoing debate between the merger versus the accretion scenarios." said astronomer Nimesh Patel of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "We've found a clear example of an accretion disk around a high-mass protostar, which supports the latter while providing important observational constraints to the theoretical models."

July 08, 2005 Deep Impact Was a Dust-up, Not a Gusher News Release Smithsonian astronomers watched as the "Impactor" probe from NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft hit Comet Tempel 1 earlier this week. They monitored the impact using the ground-based Submillimeter Array (SMA) in Hawaii and NASA's orbiting Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS). Results are still coming in, but so far the scientists report seeing only weak emission from water vapor and a host of other gases that were expected to erupt from the impact site. The most conspicuous feature of the blast was brightening due to sunlight scattered by the ejected dust.

June 23, 2005 Detour: Planetary Construction Zone Ahead News Release Interstellar travelers might want to detour around the star system TW Hydrae to avoid a messy planetary construction site. Astronomer David Wilner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and his colleagues have discovered that the gaseous protoplanetary disk surrounding TW Hydrae holds vast swaths of pebbles extending outward for at least 1 billion miles. These rocky chunks should continue to grow in size as they collide and stick together until they eventually form planets.

June 16, 2005 Observing the Solar System in Submillimeter Wavelengths News Release The Submillimeter Array (SMA) will be ready and watching when NASA's Deep Impact probe strikes the nucleus of Comet Tempel 1 on July 4th. The impact is expected to excavate material from the comet's interior - material left over from the earliest days of our solar system.

June 15, 2005 SMA Stares Into the Throat of a Cosmic Jet News Release Astronomers find jets everywhere when they look into space. Small jets spout from newborn stars, while huge jets blast out of the centers of galaxies. Yet despite their commonness, the processes that drive them remain shrouded in mystery. Even relatively nearby stellar jets hide their origins behind almost impenetrable clouds of dust. All stars, including our sun, pass through a jet phase during their "childhood," so astronomers are eager to understand how jets form and how they may influence star and planet formation.

June 14, 2005 SMA Confirms Proto-Planetary Systems are Common in the Galaxy News Release Meeting this week in Cambridge, Mass., astronomers using the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, confirmed, for the first time, that many of the objects termed "proplyds" found in the Orion Nebula do have sufficient material to form new planetary systems like our own.

June 13-16, 2005 Submillimeter Astronomy in the era of the SMA SMA Event: Website The submillimeter wavelengths provide a unique window on cold dust emission and highly excited lines from molecules and ions. As the bulk of the visible universe is cold, the submillimeter window is as close as we can get to the radiation peak from the ground. With the introduction of large format array detectors, a range of interesting phenomena from debris disks to high-redshift galaxies have been detected. With the construction of the Submillimeter Array, angular resolution better than an arc second has been achieved. This meeting will focus on what has been learned, and where the future of the field lies, especially now that ALMA is under construction.

June 13, 2005 The Submillimeter Array: Studying the Past, Pioneering the Future News Release Astronomers are meeting this week in Cambridge, Mass., to discuss recent advances generated by a new astronomical facility-the Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. A joint project of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), the SMA has opened a new window onto the cosmos by observing radiation from some of the coldest, dustiest, and most distant objects in the universe.