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KECK OBSERVATORY OPEN HOUSE SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, 2008: WELCOME TO THE EDGE OF DISCOVERY
(September 4th, 2008) W. M. Keck Observatorys 2008 Open House will feature “hands-on activities” and displays presenting the science, technology and excitement of astronomy.
Read More >MOST BLACK HOLES MIGHT COME IN ONLY SMALL AND LARGE
(August 20th, 2008) Black holes are sometimes huge cosmic beasts, billions of times the mass of our sun, and sometimes petite with just a few times the sun’s mass. But do black holes also come in size medium? Research combining data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory […]
Read More >Extrasolar Planets: The Last Decade, and the Next
(July 24, 2008) Dr. Paul Butler from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism presents “Extrasolar Planets: The Last Decade, and the Next.” Before 1995 planets outside our Solar System were the stuff of science fiction, Star Wars and Star Trek. Now with nearly 300 exo-planets known, many of them discovered at Keck, […]
Read More >RARE STAR MAKING MACHINE FOUND IN EARLY UNIVERSE
(July 11th, 2008) Astronomers have uncovered an extreme stellar machine of a galaxy in the very remote universe, pumping out stars at a surprising rate of up to 4,000 per year. In comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy turns out an average of just 10 stars per year. The discovery was made possible by combining […]
Read More >Searching for Other Habitable Worlds
(June 18, 2008) Dr. Gregory Laughlin from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his colleagues have been leading the way in the search for exoplanets, discovering about 60% of known planets around other nearby stars. For more than a decade, most of the planets that were identified are gas giant planets like our […]
Read More >ASTRONOMERS WEIGH THE COLDEST BROWN DWARFS WITH ASTRONOMY’S SHARPEST EYES
Honolulu (June 2nd, 2008) Astronomers have used ultrasharp images obtained with the Keck Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope to determine for the first time the masses of the coldest class of “failed stars,” a.k.a. brown dwarfs. With masses as light as 3 percent the mass of the sun, these are the lowest mass free-floating objects […]
Read More >KECK, HUBBLE IMAGES SHOW CONTINUED TURBULENCE IN JUPITER’S ATMOSPHERE
Berkeley (May 22nd, 2008) Increased turbulence and storms first observed on Jupiter more than two years ago are still raging, according to astronomers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, who snapped high-resolution pictures of the planet earlier this month. Captured with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and […]
Read More >Planet Forming Disks: What We Can Learn by Combining the World’s Largest T
(May 22, 2008) Dr. Rafael Millan-Gabet from the California Institute of Technology presents “Planet Forming Disks – What We Can Learn by Combining the World’s Largest Telescopes.” His research examines physical conditions in the inner parts of disks around young stars, where planets like Earth are believed to form. Combining the largest existing telescopes so […]
Read More >COMPACT GALAXIES IN EARLY UNIVERSE PACK A BIG PUNCH
Baltimore, Md. (April 29th, 2008) Imagine receiving an announcement touting the birth of a baby 20 inches long and weighing 180 pounds. After reading this puzzling message, you would immediately think the baby’s weight was a misprint. Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, received a […]
Read More >Planetary Debris Disks
(April 24, 2008) Dr. James Graham from the University of California at Berkeley presents “Planetary Debris Disks”. Planetary debris disks are circumstellar clouds of dust detected in young planetary systems. This dust is believed to be released by collisions between larger bodies such as comets, asteroids and even planets. Although this dust was discovered in […]
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