In the June/July 2010 issue of Hana Hou!, the magazine of Hawaiian Airlines, editor Julia Steele features Mauna Kea, describing it as the epicenter of astronomy and reviewing some of the most significant discoveries made on the mountain.
Astronomers using both 10-meter Keck telescopes together have peered deep into swirling clouds of gas and dust that will eventually become planetary systems like the Solar system. The team studied 15 young Milky Way stars and observed proto-planetary disk material within 0.1 astronomical units, or nine million miles, of the target star.
Jerry Nelson, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and designer of the revolutionary segmented-mirror Keck telescopes will share the $1 million Kavli Prize in Astrophysics with two other researchers for their innovations in the field of telescope design. Nelson’s innovations in the field of telescope design have allowed glimpses of ever more distant and ancient objects and events in the remote corners of the Universe.
Charles Steidel, the Lee A. DuBridge Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, was awarded the 2010 Cosmology Prize of The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation. The award recognizes Steidel’s revolutionary studies using the W. M. Keck Observatory of the most distant galaxies in the Universe.
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