News
News
Swinburne and W. M. Keck Observatory Form Historic Scientific Partnership to Unlock New Era of Space Discovery for Australia and the U.S.
Swinburne University of Technology has become the first organization outside of the United States to join the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaiʻi as a scientific partner. The new scientific partnership builds on Swinburne’s 15-year association with the Observatory through a strategic agreement with Caltech under which Swinburne researchers have been able to demonstrate outstanding […]
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Uranus Aurora Discovery Offers Clues to Habitable Icy Worlds
Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – The presence of an infrared aurora on the cold, outer planet of Uranus has been confirmed for the first time by University of Leicester astronomers. The discovery could shed light on the mysteries behind the magnetic fields of the planets of our solar system, and even on whether distant worlds might support life. Using […]
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Record-breaking Fast Radio Burst is Most Distant Ever Detected
Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – Scientists have discovered an eight-billion-year-old fast radio burst (FRB) – the most ancient and distant located to date. A global team that includes UC Santa Cruz Professor of Astronomy J. Xavier Prochaska, an expert in spectroscopy, and was led by Macquarie University’s Stuart Ryder and Swinburne University of Technology’s Associate Professor Ryan […]
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Cosmic Web Lights Up in the Darkness of Space
Keck Cosmic Web Imager Offers Best Glimpse Yet of the Filamentous Network That Connects Galaxies Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – Like rivers feeding oceans, streams of gas nourish galaxies throughout the cosmos. But these streams, which make up a part of the so-called cosmic web, are very faint and hard to see. While astronomers have known about […]
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NASA Selects Groups to Guide ‘Habitable Worlds Observatory’ Activities, Invites Community Participation
NASA has selected 56 individuals to participate in groups that will guide maturation activities for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). HWO is a concept for a NASA flagship mission, as recommended by the 2020 Astrophysics Decadal Survey, that would pursue a breadth of astrophysics goals, including searching for and characterizing potentially habitable planets beyond our […]
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Clouds On Neptune Perform a Surprise Disappearing Act
Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – For the first time in nearly three decades of observations, clouds seen on Neptune have all but vanished. Images from 1994 to 2022 of the big blue planet captured from Maunakea on Hawaiʻi Island through the lens of W. M. Keck Observatory, along with views from space via NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope […]
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Two-Faced Star Exposed: Unusual White Dwarf Star is Made of Hydrogen on One Side and Helium on the Other
Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – In a first for white dwarfs, the burnt-out cores of dead stars, astronomers have discovered that at least one member of this cosmic family is two-faced. One side of the white dwarf is composed of hydrogen, while the other is made up of helium. The findings, which include data from the Zwicky […]
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Starlight and the First Black Holes: Researchers Detect the Host Galaxies of Quasars in the Early Universe
Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – An international team of scientists, including Chien-Hsiu Lee, staff astronomer at W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, has captured images for the first time of starlight from two massive galaxies hosting actively growing black holes, or quasars, from less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The successful detection […]
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Life After Death: Hawaiʻi Astronomers Find a Planet that Shouldn’t Exist
Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – When our Sun reaches the end of its life, it will expand to 100 times its current size, enveloping the Earth. Many planets in other solar systems face a similar doom as their host stars grow old. But not all hope is lost, as astronomers from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for […]
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New Era of Exoplanet Discovery Begins with Images of ‘Jupiter’s Younger Sibling’
Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – Astronomers using W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island have discovered one of the lowest-mass planets whose images have been directly captured. Not only were they able to measure its mass, but they were also able to determine that its orbit is similar to the giant planets in our own solar […]
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