Stephen Ridgway
Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a ground-based astronomical facility under construction, a joint project of the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, designed to conduct a multi-purpose 10-year optical survey of the…
We summarize some of the compelling new scientific opportunities for understanding stars and stellar systems that can be enabled by sub-milliarcsec (sub-mas) angular resolution, UV-Optical spectral imaging observations, which can reveal the…
The next decade will feature a growing number of massive ground-based photometric, spectroscopic, and time-domain surveys, including those produced by DECam, DESI, and LSST. The NOAO Data Lab was launched in 2017 to enable efficient…
We have obtained repeated images of 6 fields towards the Galactic bulge in 5 passbands (u, g, r, i, z) with the DECam imager on the Blanco 4m telescope at CTIO. From over 1.6 billion individual photometric measurements in the field centered…
Super-high spatial resolution observations in the infrared are now enabling major advances in our understanding of supermassive black hole systems at the centers of galaxies. Infrared interferometry, reaching resolutions of milliarcseconds…
During the late phases of evolution, low-to-intermediate mass stars like our Sun undergo periods of extensive mass loss, returning up to 80% of their initial mass to the interstellar medium. This mass loss profoundly affects the stellar…
Evolved stars dominate galactic spectra, enrich the galactic medium, expand to change their planetary systems, eject winds of a complex nature, produce spectacular nebulae and illuminate them, and transfer material between binary…
We are now in an era where we can image details on the surfaces of stars. When resolving stellar surfaces, we see that every surface is uniquely complicated. Each imaged star provides insight into not only the stellar surface structures,…
Most of the sky has been imaged with NOAO's telescopes from both hemispheres. While the large majority of these data were obtained for PI-led projects and almost all of the images are publicly available, only a small fraction have been…
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI, www.planetformationimager.org) is a next-generation infrared interferometer array with the primary goal of imaging the active phases of planet formation in nearby star forming regions. PFI will be sensitive…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is designed to provide an unprecedented optical imaging dataset that will support investigations of our Solar System, Galaxy and Universe, across half the sky and over ten years of repeated observation.…
The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) is a joint effort of NOAO and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona to build prototype software to process alerts from time-domain surveys,…
We present direct radii measurements of the well-known transiting exoplanet host stars HD 189733 and HD 209458 using the CHARA Array interferometer. We find the limb-darkened angular diameters to be theta_LD = 0.3848 +/- 0.0055 and 0.2254…
The parallax of pulsation, and its implementations such as the Baade-Wesselink method and the infrared surface bright- ness technique, is an elegant method to determine distances of pulsating stars in a quasi-geometrical way. However, these…
We use near-infrared interferometric data coupled with trigonometric parallax values and spectral energy distribution fitting to directly determine stellar radii, effective temperatures, and luminosities for the exoplanet host stars 61 Vir,…
Based on CHARA Array measurements, we present the angular diameters of 23 nearby, main- sequence stars, ranging from spectral type A7 to K0, five of which are exoplanet host stars. We derive linear radii, effective temperatures, and…
We present interferometric diameter measurements of 21 K- and M- dwarfs made with the CHARA Array. This sample is enhanced by literature radii measurements to form a data set of 33 K-M dwarfs with diameters measured to better than 5%. For…
The late-type dwarf GJ 436 is known to host a transiting Neptune-mass planet in a 2.6-day orbit. We present results of our interferometric measurements to directly determine the stellar diameter ($R_{\star} = 0.455 \pm 0.018 R_{\odot}$) and…
We have executed a survey of nearby, main sequence A, F, and G-type stars with the CHARA Array, successfully measuring the angular diameters of fortyfour stars with an average precision of ~ 1.5%. We present new measures of the bolometric…
GJ 581 is an M dwarf host of a multiplanet system. We use long-baseline interferometric measurements from the CHARA Array, coupled with trigonometric parallax information, to directly determine its physical radius to be $0.299 \pm 0.010…