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Astronomers Confirm Existence of Two Giant Newborn Planets in PDS 70 System
New Direct Images Captured with W. M. Keck Observatory’s Upgraded Adaptive Optics System Lead to First Independent Confirmation of PDS 70 Protoplanets Maunakea, Hawaii – New evidence shows the first-ever pictures capturing the birth of a pair of planets orbiting the star PDS 70 are in fact authentic. Using a new infrared pyramid wavefront sensor […]
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Hawaii Astronomers Help Decipher Rhythm Among Young Stars
Maunakea, Hawaii – By “listening” to the “beating hearts” of stars, an international team of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy (UH IfA), detected a rhythm of life for a class of stellar objects that puzzled scientists until now. The findings are an important contribution to the overall understanding of […]
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Newly Discovered Exoplanet Dethrones Former King of Kepler-88 Planetary System
Hawaii Astronomer Discovers Massive Extrasolar Planet with Maunakea Telescope Maunakea, Hawaii – Our solar system has a king. The planet Jupiter, named for the most powerful god in the Greek pantheon, has bossed around the other planets through its gravitational influence. With twice the mass of Saturn, and 300 times that of Earth, Jupiter’s slightest […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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