Media
Cosmic Videos
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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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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