Media
Cosmic Videos
Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Discovering Planets With the Keck Planet Finder
Guest Speaker: Dr. Andrew Howard Astronomy Professor, Division of Physics, Mathematics, & Astronomy California Institute of Technology Keck Observatory’s newest instrument is the Keck Planet Finder (KPF), a spectrometer that will allow for the discovery of smaller planets than ever before, including Earth-mass planets orbiting nearby stars. KPF uses the latest technology to make ultra-precise […]
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Astronomy Talk: The Sound of Stars
Guest Speaker Dan Huber Associate Astronomer University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy Although we cannot hear it with our own ears, the Sun and other stars in the sky have been performing a concert for billions of years. Similar to a boiling pot of water, gas cells on the surface of stars that are the […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Unveiling Outflowing Galactic Winds with the Keck Cosmic Web Imager
Guest Speaker: Dr. Alison Coil Associate Dean in Division of Physical Sciences, Professor of Physics University of California at San Diego In this talk, research will be presented that Dr. Coil and collaborators have been leading on extremely fast outflowing galactic winds being ejected from compact, starburst galaxies. Such outflows are thought to be a […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Forming Stars, Planets, and Scientists: Keck’s Transformative Role in Both Science and Education
Guest Speaker: Dr. Quinn Konopacky Astrophysicist & Associate Professor University of California at San Diego The birth of stars is a complex and dynamic process, one that leads eventually to the formation of planets and possibly life. Yet we still know very little about the way in which the Universe turns a massive cloud of […]
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Astronomy Talk: Truth is Stranger than (Science) Fiction
Guest Speaker Jessie Christiansen Astrophysicist NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech We speculated about the existence of planets orbiting other Suns for hundreds, if not thousands of years before their existence was finally confirmed. During that time we invented and depicted many new and now iconic sci-fi worlds – mysterious planets with exotic landscapes, orbiting […]
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Astronomy Talk: Origin of Earth’s Water
Guest Speaker Karen Meech Astronomer Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawai`i at Manoa No one knows if our solar system, with a planet possessing the necessary ingredients for life within our Sun’s habitable zone, is a cosmic rarity. Nor do we know whether the gas giants in our solar system played a role in helping […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: The Status of Major Instrumentation Projects at Keck Observatory
Guest Speaker: Marc Kassis Instrument Manager W. M. Keck Observatory In this talk, Dr. Kassis provides a status update on instrument development activities for projects delivering to the observatory. This includes images and photos of the assembly, integration, and testing of the Keck Planet Finder, Laser Frequency Comb, and the Keck Cosmic Reionization Mapper that […]
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Keck Observatory Donor Salon: Towards the Direct Imaging of Habitable Exoplanets with Extremely Large Telescopes
Guest Speaker: Dr. Rebecca Jensen-Clem Assistant Professor of Astronomy & Astrophysics UC Santa Cruz Fifty-three years ago, 600 million people watched the Apollo 11 astronauts take the first human steps on another world. In 1969, the number of worlds worth walking on was small: just the few dozen planets and moons that make up the […]
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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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