Guest Speaker Andrea Ghez 2020 Nobel Prize Winner UCLA Professor of Physics and Astronomy FREE event – space is limited, ticket registration required: GET TICKETS Learn about new developments in the study of supermassive black holes. Through the capture and analysis of twenty years of high-resolution imaging, the UCLA Galactic Center Group has moved the […]
Guest Speaker Nadia Drake Science Journalist For millennia, humans have wondered whether there’s life beyond Earth. Over the last half-century or so, these musings have evolved from fantasy and speculation into a legitimate scientific endeavor, guided largely by the Drake Equation — a formula that estimates the number of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations in our Milky […]
Guest Speaker Alan Stern Principal Investigator NASA New Horizons Mission, Southwest Research Institute NASA’s New Horizons is the first spacecraft to successfully explore the Pluto System and a Kuiper Belt Object named Arrokoth, making history as the farthest flyby ever performed in our solar system. Learn more about the mission, the scientific payload it carries, […]
Guest Speaker Thomas H. Zurbuchen Former Head of Science NASA Ever since NASA was established in 1958, expanding human knowledge of Earth, atmospheric phenomena, and space has been NASA’s priority. Discoveries made with both robotic and human exploration has changed how we think about the universe, our planet, and life beyond our planet. Dr. Zurbuchen […]
In our standard model of cosmology, only five percent of the mass-energy budget of the Universe is accounted for by particles that have been detected in Earth-based laboratories. The remaining 95 percent, called dark matter and dark energy, has only been detected gravitationally via astronomical observations. Although the abundance of dark matter and dark energy […]
Where We Came From — How Solar Systems FormHow common are Earths? Unknown just a generation ago, more than 2,000 planets have been discovered orbiting other stars in our galaxy and Hawaii’s own Keck Observatory has been at the forefront of this incredibly exciting field. We have invited Professor Greg Laughlin, an expert on planet […]
A Hilo native born in Keaukaha and raised in Panaʻewa, Celeste “Cesi” Manuia Ha’o is an Educate Associate and the Outreach Coordinator of the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center of Hawaiʻi. Also a member of the ʻOhana Waʻa, Celeste is an apprentice navigator who recently co-navigated Hawaiʻi’s famed voyaging canoe, Hōkūleʻa, as part of the Mālama Honua […]
Knowledge about our own Solar System has increased by leaps and bounds over the past few decades due to a combination of spacecraft missions and technical advancements at the W. M. Keck Observatory and other telescopes.Imke de Pater, Professor of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley will start with a short overview of the numerous […]
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden will discuss America’s space program and the challenges the agency faces for the missions of tomorrow. Using a stepping stone approach that builds on the capabilities of our unique orbiting laboratory – the International Space Station – the growing abilities of commercial providers to reach space, and a new rocket and […]
The Stellar Zoo at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy would be quite unfamiliar to a terrestrial visitor. Not only do the types of stars differ in many ways from what we can see in our serene nighttime sky from Earth, but the stars at the galactic center are also not behaving like the […]
University of Hawaii Meterorology Professor, Steven Businger will offer a layman’s look at the amazing variety of weather experienced by the Island of Hawaii and will include lots of imagery and illustrations. Topics touched on will include the impact of hurricanes, thunderstorms and blizzards on the Big Island, forecasting for astronomy on Mauna Kea, and some thoughts on the […]
As the building blocks of the Universe, galaxies are massive structures that can contain trillions of stars. Galaxies in today’s Universe show a striking diversity among their properties, with large variations in their appearance, age, size, weight, and stellar birth rate. Despite this diversity, galaxies can broadly be divided into two types: low-mass spiral galaxies […]
