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News
Keck Helps Discover Record Fifth Planet
Berkeley (November 6th, 2007) A team of American astronomers announced the discovery of a record-breaking fifth planet around the nearby star 55 Cancri, making it the only star aside from the sun known to have five planets. The discovery comes after 19 years of observations of 55 Cancri and represents a milestone for the California […]
Read More >Morning forecast on Titan calls for widespread methane drizzle off Xanadu, according to Keck, VLT im
(October 11th, 2007) Berkeley — Noted for its bizarre hydrocarbon lakes and frozen methane clouds, Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, also appears to have widespread drizzles of methane, according to a team of astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley. New near-infrared images from Hawaii’s W. M. Keck Observatory and Chile’s Very Large Telescope show for […]
Read More >Scientists ‘Weigh’ Tiny Galaxy Halfway Across Universe
(October 4th, 2007) Santa Barbara, California –– A tiny galaxy, nearly halfway across the universe, the smallest in size and mass known to exist at that distance, has been identified by an international team of scientists led by two from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The scientists used data collected by NASA’s Hubble Space […]
Read More >Dark, but Light: Smallest Galaxies Ever Seen Solve a Big Problem
Mauna Kea (September 12th, 2007) Mauna Kea scientists may have solved a discrepancy between the number of extremely small, faint galaxies predicted to exist near the Milky Way and the number actually observed. In an attempt to resolve the “Missing Dwarf Galaxy” problem, two astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory to study a population […]
Read More >‘One Of The Most Curious Objects In The Sky’ Delights Astronomers Again
Mauna Kea (August 29th, 2007) Edwin Hubble once called IC 10 “one of the most curious objects in the sky,” and new observations of the extremely faint, lightweight dwarf galaxy are giving scientists new clues about how populations of stars are born. Though the properties of stars is one of the most well-studied topics in […]
Read More >Scientists Study Changes In Planets Rings
Berkeley (August 23rd, 2007) As the rings of Uranus swing edge-on to Earth – a short-lived view we get only once every 42 years – astronomers observing the event are getting an unprecedented, glare-free view of the rings and the fine dust that permeates them. The rings were discovered in 1977, so this is the […]
Read More >Polluted Dead Star Indicates Planets Like Earth May Have Formed Around Other Stars
Los Angeles (August 16th, 2007) The chemical fingerprint of a burned-out star indicates that Earth-like planets may not be rare in the universe and could give clues to what our solar system will look like when our sun dies and becomes a white dwarf star some five billion years from now. Astronomers using data obtained […]
Read More >Keck Confirms Largest Exoplanet To Date
Mauna Kea (August 6th, 2007) An international team of astronomers has discovered the largest-radius and lowest-density exoplanet of all those whose mass and radius are known. It is a gas-giant planet about twice the size of Jupiter, and is likely to have a curved comet-like tail. It has been named TrES-4, as the fourth planet […]
Read More >‘Blue Needle’ Presents New Challenge for Theorists
Mauna Kea (July 19th, 2007) Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study disks of debris around stars have found one that is extremely lopsided. While scientists are accustomed to finding asymmetrical accumulations of dust and larger bodies around stars, the debris disk around a star known as HD […]
Read More >Astronomers Find Most Distant Known Galaxies
Pasadena, Calif. (July 10th, 2007) Using natural “gravitational lenses,” an international team of astronomers claim to have found the first traces of a population of the most distant galaxies yet seen-the light we see from them today left more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was just 500 million years old. Team leader […]
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