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Polluted Dead Star Indicates Planets Like Earth May Have Formed Around Other Stars
Los Angeles (August 16th, 2007) The chemical fingerprint of a burned-out star indicates that Earth-like planets may not be rare in the universe and could give clues to what our solar system will look like when our sun dies and becomes a white dwarf star some five billion years from now. Astronomers using data obtained […]
Read More >Keck Confirms Largest Exoplanet To Date
Mauna Kea (August 6th, 2007) An international team of astronomers has discovered the largest-radius and lowest-density exoplanet of all those whose mass and radius are known. It is a gas-giant planet about twice the size of Jupiter, and is likely to have a curved comet-like tail. It has been named TrES-4, as the fourth planet […]
Read More >‘Blue Needle’ Presents New Challenge for Theorists
Mauna Kea (July 19th, 2007) Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to study disks of debris around stars have found one that is extremely lopsided. While scientists are accustomed to finding asymmetrical accumulations of dust and larger bodies around stars, the debris disk around a star known as HD […]
Read More >Astronomers Find Most Distant Known Galaxies
Pasadena, Calif. (July 10th, 2007) Using natural “gravitational lenses,” an international team of astronomers claim to have found the first traces of a population of the most distant galaxies yet seen-the light we see from them today left more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was just 500 million years old. Team leader […]
Read More >Astronomers Measure Mass of Largest Dwarf Planet
Baltimore (June 14th, 2007) W. M. Keck Observatory and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have teamed up to precisely measure the mass of Eris, the largest member of a new class of dwarf planets in our solar system. Eris has 27 percent more mass than Pluto, formerly the largest member of the Kuiper Belt of icy […]
Read More >‘OLYMPIAN GALAXY’ NEAR ANDROMEDA GIVES CLUES TO HOW GALAXIES FORM
Honolulu (May 28th, 2007) A newly discovered dwarf galaxy in the Local Group has been found to have formed in a region of space far from our own and is falling into our system for the first time in its history, according to new data obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory. An international team […]
Read More >Adaptive optics pinpoints two supermassive black holes in colliding galaxies
Santa Cruz (May 17th, 2007) Astronomers have used powerful adaptive optics technology at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to reveal the precise locations and environments of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of an ongoing collision between two galaxies 300 million light-years away. The new observations of the galaxy merger […]
Read More >Brightest Supernova Ever Seen
Berkeley (May 7th, 2007) An exploding star first observed last September is the largest and most luminous supernova ever seen, according to University of California, Berkeley, astronomers, and may be the first example of a type of massive exploding star rare today but probably common in the very early universe. Unlike typical supernovas that reach […]
Read More >“Red Square” Captured by Palomar and Keck Telescopes
Pasadena (April 11th, 2007) Astronomers announced the arrival of a new member in the pantheon of exotically beautiful celestial objects. Christened the “Red Square” by Peter Tuthill, leader of the team, the image was compiled with data from the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory, owned and operated by the California Institute of Technology, and […]
Read More >Fundamental Property of Galaxies Discovered at W. M. Keck Observatory
Kamuela (March 6th, 2007) A new study using data collected by the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has revealed that certain fundamental properties of galaxies have actually changed very little over the last 8 billion years, nearly half of the age of the universe. According to the research, the relationship between a galaxy’s mass […]
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