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Keck Telescope Images Super-Luminous Supernova
Austin, Texas – The Keck I Telescope has played a key role in unraveling the mysteries of one of the brightest supernovas ever discovered. The supernova, called Supernova 2008am, is 3.7 billion light-years away from Earth. At its peak luminosity, it was over 100 billion times brighter than the Sun. It emitted enough energy in […]
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New Candidate For Coldest ‘Star’
Kamuela, HI – There is a new candidate for coldest known star: a brown dwarf with about the same temperature as a hot cup of coffee. That’s cool enough to begin crossing the blurry line between small cold stars and big hot planets. Brown dwarfs are essentially failed stars: they lack the mass and gravity […]
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Europa Helps Astronomers Penetrate Jupiter’s Lost Belt
Kamuela, HI – The ongoing turmoil inside Jupiter’s missing – and slowly re-emerging – South Equatorial Belt can now be seen in unprecedented detail thanks to the Keck II telescope’s Adaptive Optics system and the cooperation of the icy Jovian moon Europa (more on Jupiter’s missing belt. In this newly released Keck image, the gas […]
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Royal Honor Awarded to Astronomer Richard Ellis
Pasadena, CA – Richard Salisbury Ellis, the Steele Family Professor of Astronomy at Caltech, has received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. Awarded annually since 1824, the Gold Medal is the society’s highest honor and one of the premier prizes in astronomy. Ellis joins a long list of distinguished recipients, including several from […]
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NASA Study Distinguishes Most Distant Galaxy Cluster
Kamuela, HI – Astronomers have uncovered a burgeoning galactic metropolis, the most distant known in the early universe. This ancient collection of galaxies presumably grew into a modern galaxy cluster similar to the massive ones seen today. The developing cluster, named COSMOS-AzTEC3, was discovered and characterized using multiple telescopes, including NASA’s Spitzer, Chandra and Hubble […]
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Astronomers Discover New Clues to Galaxy Evolution
Seattle, WA – Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and University of Hawai’i (UH) have discovered 16 close-knit pairs of supermassive black holes in merging galaxies. The research findings, based on observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, were presented in Seattle this […]
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Keck Observatory Pictures show Fourth Planet in Giant Solar System
Kamuela, HI – Astronomers announced the discovery of a fourth giant planet joining three others orbiting a nearby star with information that challenges our current understanding of planet formation. The dusty young star named HR8799, located 129 light years away, was first recognized in 2008 when these same astronomers presented the first-ever images of a […]
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Observations of Jupiter Reveal Rare Signatures of Weather
Kamuela, HI, – One of Jupiter’s dark brown stripes that faded out last spring is regaining its color, providing an unprecedented opportunity for astronomers to observe a rare and mysterious phenomenon caused by the planet’s winds and cloud chemistry. Earlier this year, amateur astronomers noticed that the long-standing stripe, known as the South Equatorial Belt […]
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Study says Solar Systems like ours may be Common
Kamuela, HI, – Nearly one in four stars like the Sun could have Earth-size planets, according to observations of nearby solar-mass stars made with the Keck telescopes in Hawai’i. UC Berkeley astronomers Andrew Howard and Geoffrey Marcy chose 166 G and K stars within 80 light years of Earth and observed them for five years […]
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Ground-Based Images of Asteroid Lutetia Complement Spacecraft Flyby
Kamuela, HI, – The European Space Agency (ESA) Rosetta spacecraft recently beamed back to Earth a dramatic set of close-up images as it flew past the asteroid Lutetia, on its way to a comet rendezvous in 2014. But even before Rosetta made its close encounter with the 100-kilometer sized asteroid, astronomers using three of the […]
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