Media
Cosmic Videos
Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Hunting for Black Holes in the Milky Way Galaxy
Guest Speaker: Dr. Jessica Lu Associate Professor of Astronomy University of California at Berkeley The population of stellar mass black holes in the Milky Way is almost entirely unexplored. Only a dozen black holes are confidently known in our Galaxy — all in binary systems. As a result, many basic properties of black holes remain […]
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Astronomy Talk: Planetary Defense at NASA
Guest Speakers Kelly Fast and Lindley Johnson Near-Earth Observations Program Manager and Planetary Defense Officer NASA Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets that orbit the Sun like the planets, but with orbits that can bring them into Earth’s neighborhood. An asteroid impact is the only natural disaster that could be prevented, so early identification […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: A Stretching Gas Cloud and Other Dusty Objects That Orbit Close to the Galactic Black Hole
Guest Speaker: Randy Campbell Keck Observatory Observing Support Manager W.M. Keck Observatory The Supermassive Black Hole (SBH) at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy is surrounded by a dense cluster of stars embedded in a complex structure of gas and dust. Randy will unveil results from recent studies on the more prominent dust and […]
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Astronomy Talk: Exploring the Ice Giants with Keck Observatory and Other Telescopes
Guest Speaker Heidi Hammel Vice President for Science The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) During the late 1980s, our understanding of the local ice giants – Uranus and Neptune – was revolutionized by detailed images taken by the Voyager spacecraft. However, those images were static: brief snapshots in time of complex and […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Celebrating 175 Years of Neptune: A Story From Its Discovery to the Present
Guest Speaker: Dr. Imke De Pater Professor Emerita and Professor of the Graduate School Departments of Astronomy and of Earth and Planetary Science at the University of California at Berkeley Neptune was discovered on September 24, 1846 (~175 years ago). Since its discovery, we have learned much about the planet itself, its moons and ring […]
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Astronomy Talk: The Year(s) Ahead: What’s on the Horizon for Astronomy?
Guest Speaker John O’Meara Chief Scientist W. M. Keck Observatory The coming year promises to be an exciting one for astronomy on the ground and in space. With new instrumentation being delivered to Keck Observatory, and exciting missions like JWST in space, 2022 will deliver transformative new capabilities to astronomy. Looking even farther in the […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Broadening Our Horizons With the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
Guest Speaker: Dr. Gregory Wirth Principal Systems Engineer Ball Aerospace What’s the true nature of dark energy and dark matter, those invisible forces that both bind together and may ultimately tear apart the Universe? And how common are solar systems like our own? Astronomers have made important progress in answering these key questions using Keck […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: The Keck Discovery Engine: A Transformative New Capability for Science
Guest Speaker: Dr. John O’Meara Chief Scientist W.M. Keck Observatory Keck has maintained leadership in astronomy for three decades because of the creativity of its community, the nimbleness of its observing model, and the power of its telescope, instrumentation, and site on Maunakea. As Keck enters the era of even larger telescopes on the ground, […]
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Astronomy Talk: Planet 9 From Outer Space
Guest Speaker: Mike Brown Director Caltech Center for Comparative Planetary Evolution (The Guy Who Killed Pluto) In the past 175 years, more than 30 separate astronomers have suggested the existence of a giant planet beyond Neptune. They have always been wrong. In 2016, Dr. Michael Brown and Dr. Konstantin Batygin joined the list, suggesting that Planet […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Imaging Other Worlds: Today and Tomorrow
Guest Speaker: Dr. Michael Liu Astronomer University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy Direct imaging is a key method to study planets around other stars, a.k.a. exoplanets. Thanks to both astronomical and instrumental advances, the largest ground-based telescopes can now obtain images and spectra of gas-giant (Jupiter-like) planets. Dr. Liu will share what these studies with […]
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