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Cosmic Videos
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 >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 >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 >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 […]
Read More >Recycling and Synthesis in the Cosmos
(February 10, 2008) Dr. Mike Bolte from the University of California Observatories discusses the enormous advances being made in the study of stellar evolution and the genesis of elements from the simple to the complex. Bolte and his collaborators make observations of the oldest stars and star clusters in our Milky Way Galaxy to better […]
Read More >Cosmic Dawn: Pursuit of the First Galaxies
(January 16, 2008) Dr. Richard Ellis discusses how using a pioneering technique called “gravitational lensing” allows an international team of astronomers to measure traces of the very first galaxies formed after the Big Bang. Richard, the Steele Professor of Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, and his colleagues have made remarkable progress uncovering the […]
Read More >Making it Big in Astronomy
(December 19, 2007) In 1977 Jerry Nelson was physicist at UC’s Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and he was asked to join a group to vision the future of US astronomy. For Nelson it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to design a major apparatus with “cosmic implications.” His work translated into the revolutionary twin 10-meter Keck telescopes. Decades […]
Read More >Where Do Planets Come From?
(September 10, 2007) Understanding the birth of planets has been a long-sought goal. It is the key to learning about Earth and the other types of planets orbiting stars other than our Sun. What are Mauna Kea Observatories telling us about our cosmic origins? What amazing discoveries are being made with the most technologically advanced […]
Read More >The Tale of Star and Planet Formation
(August 16, 2007) Star and planet formation is happening today in a molecular cloud near you! By observing objects of different ages we can develop an understanding of how the process works. Dr. Hillenbrand, from the California Institute of Technology, will highlight her observations made at the Keck Observatory to help tell this tale. Science […]
Read More >OSIRIS: The Latest Keck Instrument and its Science
(July 22, 2007) UCLA astronomer Dr. James Larkin talks about research using OSIRIS. OSIRIS is the newest instrument at Keck and is designed to dissect small patches of the sky in unprecedented detail. It has already been applied to study the moons of the Jovian planets, the black hole at the center of our Galaxy, […]
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