News

Goldstein to showcase art at Keck Observatory

Laurie Goldstein, an artist in North Kohala, created her first work of art at age five. With a cardboard tracing of her foot, some ribbon and blue and gold paint, she crafted a pair of Grecian sandals. “I have no idea where I’d seen something like that or how I figured out how to make […]

Keck Observatory Showcases Local Artist’s Work

KAMUELA, HI—Laurie Goldstein, a resident of North Kohala, will present a mixed media art show, entitled “Universe in Color” at the W. M. Keck Observatory headquarters, located at 65-1120 Mamalahoa Highway, in Waimea. The exhibit runs from May 20 to September 22. Public viewing of Goldstein’s art will be available during Keck Observatory’s monthly astronomy […]

Discovery Channel features Keck Observatory

The Keck II telescope’s Laser Guide Star fires into the night sky. Credit: Sarah Anderson. Black Holes, the most powerful destroyers in the Universe, the most mysterious phenomena in the heavens. For years they were only speculation, now modern astronomy is proving them frighteningly real and showing that they may well shape everything we see. […]

New Children’s Book Explores the Hunt for Other Worlds

Vicki Oransky Wittenstein, author of Planet Hunter, stands in front of the Keck telescope. Credit: Sarah Anderson. Planet Hunter: Geoff Marcy and the Search for Other Earths, published in 2010 by Boyds Mill Press, introduces readers to Dr. Geoff Marcy, the first American scientist to discover planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. Throughout this […]

Cosmic photo Album Earns Astronomer AAS Prize

A native of Italy, Tommaso Treu, now a UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist, earned degrees at University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore and was a graduate student at the Space Telescope Science Institute. His postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology and as a Hubble fellow at UCLA exposed him to two of […]

Keck Observatory Featured in NOVA Documentary

PBS Hawai’i aired Hunting the Edge of Space, a documentary exploring how the telescope has expanded our view of the Universe. The program features planet hunter Geoff Marcy and his search with the Keck I telescope and its High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph, or HIRES, for planets similar to Earth. The documentary is now available to […]

Exploring New Worlds

On a clear, crisp evening, Geoff Marcy will walk outside and gaze up at the San Francisco night sky where he lives. He looks at the stars, but his mind is on the millions or even billions of planets that may orbit them. The distant worlds are so far away that they cannot be seen with the naked eye, but Marcy knows they exist. He can imagine them circling their stars.

Like most people, he wonders whether any of those distant worlds are like Earth. Yet, unlike most people, he has access to the world’s best telescopes, including Keck Observatory, to help answer this question.  Marcy has led the way in discovering planets of all types beyond our Solar System, including super-hot orbs larger than Jupiter and icy balls similar in size to Neptune. With Keck, he and his fellow astronomers recently found distant worlds not much larger than Earth orbiting stars similar to our Sun. Such a discovery leads Marcy to believe that within the next few years, they will find the “holy grail” of planet hunting—another Earth.

Astronomers See Historical Supernova From New Angle

MAUNA KEA, HI— By observing visible “light echoes,” astronomers have assembled one of the first 3-D perspectives of a cosmic object. The new view of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A confirms that it formed during a lopsided explosion. “Light echoes allow us to conduct forensic studies of stars that exploded long ago, before modern astronomical […]

Keck Telescope Confirms Smallest Known Star Duo

Mauna Kea, HI — Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory have identified the smallest known binary system to date. The system, called HM Cancri, consists of two dead stars that revolve around each other in 5.4 minutes, by far the shortest known orbital period of any pair of stars. The team, led by Gijs […]

Second Smallest Exoplanet Found to Date Discovered at Keck

WASHINGTON D.C.— Planet hunters using Keck Observatory have detected an extrasolar planet that is only four times the mass of Earth. The planet is the second smallest exoplanet ever discovered and adds to astronomers’ growing cadre of low mass planets called super-Earths. “This is quite a remarkable discovery,” said astronomer Andrew Howard of the University […]