On Sunday, May 2, the Discovery Channel will air a new documentary entitled How the Universe Works: Black Holes.
The hour-long program features MacArthur Genius Andrea Ghez of UCLA and her research using Keck Observatory and adaptive optics to study the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
For updates on airtime, check the Discovery Channel’s TV schedule.
No where is the night sky more inspiring to ponder whether we are alone in the Universe than in Hawai’i. And, no where are astronomers working harder to answer this question. Planet Hunter: Geoff Marcy and the Search for Other Earths, explores this quest to discover other worlds, particularly ones like our own and ones that may in fact harbor life.
Tommaso Treu is a cosmic genealogist. He collects and organizes images of the Universe in the same way an individual constructs a family tree with photos.
“You start with what’s here today,” says Treu, an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara. “Looking at the collection, you see what your parents looked like and you see what your grandparents looked like and you try to figure out what happened evolutionarily.”
Instead of cataloguing images of his human ancestors, Treu begins with information on galaxies like the Milky Way and its neighbors. He then works his way back to the first compact, distant galaxies, which sit billions of light-years from Earth. His research recently earned him the 2010 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society, an award given annually to an astronomer under the age of 36 for outstanding achievement.
PBS Hawai’i aired Hunting the Edge of Space, a documentary exploring how the telescope has expanded our view of the Universe.
The program features planet hunter Geoff Marcy and his search with the Keck I telescope for planets similar to Earth. The documentary is now available to watch online.
On a clear, crisp evening, Geoff Marcy will walk outside and gaze up at the San Francisco night sky where he lives. He looks at the stars, but his mind is on the millions or even billions of planets that may orbit them. The distant worlds are so far away that they cannot be seen with the naked eye, but Marcy knows they exist. He can imagine them circling their stars.
Like most people, he wonders whether any of those distant worlds are like Earth. Yet, unlike most people, he has access to the world’s best telescopes, including Keck Observatory, to help answer this question. Marcy has led the way in discovering planets of all types beyond our Solar System, including super-hot orbs larger than Jupiter and icy balls similar in size to Neptune. With Keck, he and his fellow astronomers recently found distant worlds not much larger than Earth orbiting stars similar to our Sun. Such a discovery leads Marcy to believe that within the next few years, they will find the “holy grail” of planet hunting—another Earth.
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