News
News
Astronomers Catch Rare Eclipse of a Double Brown Dwarf System
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers working on “first light” data from a newly commissioned telescope in Chile made a chance discovery that led to the identification of a rare eclipse of two brown dwarfs. The result, which includes data taken from W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii to help confirm the discovery, published today […]
Read More >
Distant Giant Planets Form Differently Than ‘Failed Stars’
Maunakea, Hawaii – A team of astronomers led by Brendan Bowler of The University of Texas at Austin has probed the formation process of giant exoplanets and brown dwarfs, a class of objects that are more massive than giant planets, but not massive enough to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores to shine like true […]
Read More >
Astronomers Discover Unusual Monster Galaxy in the Very Early Universe
XMM-2599 Lived Fast and Died Young Maunakea, Hawaii – An international team of astronomers led by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, has found an unusual monster galaxy that existed about 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old, or just 13 percent of its current age of 13.8 […]
Read More >
Astronomers Detect Large Amounts of Oxygen in Ancient Star’s Atmosphere
Maunakea, Hawaii – An international team of astronomers from the University of California San Diego, the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), and the University of Cambridge have detected large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere of one of the oldest and most elementally depleted stars known – a “primitive star” scientists call J0815+4729. This […]
Read More >
Astronomers Discover Class of Strange Objects Near Our Galaxy’s Enormous Black Hole
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers from UCLA and W. M. Keck Observatory have discovered four more bizarre objects at the center of our galaxy, not far from the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*, that are now forming a class of their own. The study, which is part of UCLA’s Galactic Center Orbits Initiative, consists of […]
Read More >
Astronomers Spot Distant Galaxy Group Driving Ancient Cosmic Makeover
Maunakea, Hawaii – An international team of astronomers funded in part by NASA has found the farthest galaxy group identified to date. With the help of W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii, the team confirmed the trio of galaxies called EGS77 dates to a time when the universe was only 680 million years old, […]
Read More >
The ‘Cores’ of Massive Galaxies Found to Have Formed A Billion Years Earlier Than Previously Thought
Maunakea, Hawaii – A distant galaxy more massive than our Milky Way — with more than a trillion stars — has revealed that the ‘cores’ of massive galaxies in the universe had already formed 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, about 1 billion years earlier than previous measurements revealed. Researchers published their analysis in […]
Read More >
Unpredicted Stellar Black Hole Discovered
Maunakea, Hawaii – Our Milky Way Galaxy is estimated to contain 100 million stellar black holes – cosmic bodies formed by the collapse of massive stars and so dense even light can’t escape. Until now, scientists had estimated the mass of an individual stellar black hole in our Galaxy at no more than 20 times […]
Read More >
New Image Offers Close-up View of Interstellar Comet
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers at Yale University are getting a fresh glimpse of a visitor from another star; using W. M. Keck Observatory, they captured a new image of 2I/Borisov, the very first interstellar comet we know of to enter into our Solar System. The alien traveler, first spotted this summer, is steadily getting brighter […]
Read More >
NASA Scientists Confirm Water Vapor on Europa
Maunakea, Hawaii – Forty years ago, a Voyager spacecraft snapped the first closeup images of Europa, one of Jupiter’s 79 moons. These revealed brownish cracks slicing the moon’s icy surface, which give Europa the look of a veiny eyeball. Missions to the outer solar system in the decades since have amassed enough additional information about […]
Read More >
