The Waimea Family Food Truck Friday is a monthly community event that happens on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi in the heart of Waimea Town, on the front lawn of W. M. Keck Observatory’s office headquarters. Come out and support the local food and beverage vendors.
Since 2012, the Mālama Maunakea Volunteer Weed Pulls are part of the University of Hawaiʻi Center for Maunakea Stewardship’s ongoing Mālama Maunakea efforts to protect the resources on the mountain by helping to control fireweed (Senecio madagascariensis) and other invasive plant species around Maunakea’s 9,000′ elevation. Removing invasive species and weeds helps to reduce habitat […]
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 […]
Guest Speaker: David Reitze, Executive Director, LIGO Laboratory, California Institute of TechnologyASTRONOMY TALK | The first direct detections of gravitational waves in late 2015 were made possible by a dedicated forty year quest to design, build, and operate LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory. Why so long?? Dr. Reitze will discuss what makes gravitational waves so […]
Abraham Loeb, Chair of the Astronomy Department, Founding Director of the Black Hole Initiative, Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation Harvard UniversityASTRONOMY TALK | Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? Dr. Loeb will review the habitability of the universe throughout cosmic history […]
Dan David Prize Winner, Shrinivas Kulkarni California Institute of TechnologyCosmic explosions were first noted nearly two thousand years ago but only in the past hundred years have astronomers secured recognition of classes of explosions ranging from exotic eruptions to the death of stars (supernovae). The Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) and its successor, the Zwicky Transient Factory (ZTF) […]
Our current story for the origin of the heavy elements has at its core a recycling program on the grandest of scales. Using Keck, we have traced atoms as they flow from the intergalactic medium into galaxies, where they are incorporated into stars, undergo fusion, and are returned in supernovae and other types of stellar […]
Observing distant objects allows us to peer back in time to early stages of the universe, across the most active period of galaxy growth when most stars were born. While galaxies are challenging to study at such large distances, nature occasionally gives us an advantage through the phenomenon of gravitational lensing. The lensing effect can […]
Join us for the Waimea Solar System Walk on Saturday, October 29, 2016. The walk begins at Keck HQ and ends at CFHT HQ, with booths along the route. Free admission to ‘Imiloa for all keiki completing the Solar System Walk. Refreshments Hamburgers and hot dogs Costume Contest will begin at 1pm at CFHT. […]
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 […]
