Media
Cosmic Videos
Astronomy Talk: A Primitive Planetesimal in the Kuiper Belt Explored by New Horizons
NASA’s New Horizons mission broke records on New Year’s Day 2019 after encountering the most distant object in our solar system ever explored by a spacecraft – a small Kuiper Belt object named 486958 2014 MU69, also known as Ultima Thule. The peanut-shaped object’s distinct shape, called a contact binary, holds important clues about how […]
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Astronomy Talk: Exploring Planets Orbiting Nearby Stars
The NASA Kepler mission revealed that our Galaxy is teeming with planetary systems and that Earth-sized planets are common, but most of the planets Kepler detected orbit stars that are too faint to permit detailed study. Excitingly, the NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launched in April 2018 and is expected to find hundreds of […]
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Astronomy Talk: Dark Energy And The Runaway Universe
We expected the attractive force of gravity to slow down the rate at which the universe is expanding. However, observations made at Keck Observatory of very distant exploding stars show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up. Over the largest distances, the universe seems to be dominated by a mysterious, repulsive “dark energy” that […]
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Astronomy Talk: Universe in Reverse, The Keck Time Machines: What’s New in the Young Universe?
What’s new in the young universe? Shortly after the Big Bang, our universe has been measured to have been almost amazingly uniform. Fortunately for our existence, it didn’t stay that way long. The excess gravity of slightly over-dense regions slowed their expansion and eventually caused them to collapse into the first galaxies, forming the first […]
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Astronomy Talk: Shining Light on Gravity: Sometimes All That Glitters IS Gold
In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves, a radiant form of energy similar to light, but caused by gravity. A century later, scientists detected the first gravitational waves from two merging black holes. This landmark discovery and new way of viewing the universe resulted in the 2017 Nobel Prize. On August 17, […]
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Astronomy Talk: Dragonflies, Dark Matter, and the Hunt for Ghostly Galaxies – Pieter van Dokkum
They are so ghostly that you can see right through them! They look unlike any other galaxies we’ve seen before. Learn about these “ultra-diffuse” galaxies, an entirely new class of galaxies that Dragonfly, the little telescope in New Mexico, has discovered. They are as large as our own Milky Way but have 100-1000 times fewer […]
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Astronomy Talk: The Monster at the Heart of our Galaxy – Andrea Ghez
Discover this year’s exciting new developments in unraveling the mysteries of supermassive black holes. Through 20 years of high-resolution imaging, the UCLA Galactic Center Group proved that a supermassive black hole exists at the center of our galaxy. Recent observations reveal an environment around these gigantic cosmic monsters that was unexpected: young stars where there […]
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Astronomy Talk: Using Shadows to Shed New Light – James L. Green
Current estimates are that over 150 million Americans viewed the Great American Solar Eclipse on August 21, 2017 with another 60 million viewing it electronically from TV or the internet. It’s amazing to think that we are still using this opportunity to do new and exciting science even though eclipses are a regular occurrence. Eclipses […]
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Astronomy Talk: The Golden Age of Space Exploration – Charles Elachi
Over the last 50 years, JPL spacecraft have visited every planet in our solar system and roved for more than 14 years on the surface of Mars. In addition, spaceborne telescopes have detected planets around neighboring systems, studied the composition and dynamic of galaxies across the Universe, and monitored changes in our planet’s surface and […]
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Evenings with Astronomers: Research Using the Keck Telescopes – Greg Doppmann and Anna Ciurlo
Dr. Greg Doppmann, Keck Observatory Resident Astronomer, will share his research: Characterizing the Planet Forming Region around Young Stars Using Keck Observatory’s NIRSPEC Instrument. Dr. Anna Ciurlo, post-doctoral student with the UCLA Galactic Center Group and Keck Visiting Scholar, will present: Exploring the Center of Our Galaxy: Gas & Clouds Around the Supermassive Black Hole.
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