Cosmic Matters

A Mirror’s Perfect Reflection

If you think washing the mirrors and windows in your home is a daunting task, imagine cleaning two of the largest light-collecting surfaces in the astronomy world—the twin 10-meter Keck telescope mirrors. Keck Observatory’s two primary mirrors are each comprised of 36 hexagonal segments. Each segment is 1.8 meters, or 6 feet, in diameter, weighs […]

Dancing White Dwarfs

The UCSB team that discovered a white dwarf binary. Left to Right: David Kaplan, Justin Steinfadt, Avi Shporer, Lars Bildsten. Credit: George Foulsham, Office of Public Affairs, UCSB. Astrophysicists using the Keck Observatory have identified two white dwarf stars in an eclipsing binary system, allowing for the first direct radius measurement of a rare white […]

Best in Show

University of Hawaiʻi photographer R. David Beales won Best in Show at the University Photographers Association of America, or UPAA, competition for his December 2009 image “Mauna Kea Summit,” which features the W. M. Keck Observatory’s laser piercing the Hawaiian night sky. The Observatory was the first large telescope to apply adaptive optics for obtaining […]

Possible new type of Supernovae puts Calcium in your Bones

One theory of this new exploding system, shown in the simulation images (above), is that a white dwarf steals helium from a companion until the mass thief becomes very hot and dense and a nuclear explosion occurs. The helium is transformed into elements such as calcium and titanium, eventually producing the building blocks of life […]

Goldstein to showcase art at Keck Observatory

Laurie Goldstein, an artist in North Kohala, created her first work of art at age five. With a cardboard tracing of her foot, some ribbon and blue and gold paint, she crafted a pair of Grecian sandals. “I have no idea where I’d seen something like that or how I figured out how to make […]

Discovery Channel features Keck Observatory

The Keck II telescope’s Laser Guide Star fires into the night sky. Credit: Sarah Anderson. Black Holes, the most powerful destroyers in the Universe, the most mysterious phenomena in the heavens. For years they were only speculation, now modern astronomy is proving them frighteningly real and showing that they may well shape everything we see. […]

New Children’s Book Explores the Hunt for Other Worlds

Vicki Oransky Wittenstein, author of Planet Hunter, stands in front of the Keck telescope. Credit: Sarah Anderson. Planet Hunter: Geoff Marcy and the Search for Other Earths, published in 2010 by Boyds Mill Press, introduces readers to Dr. Geoff Marcy, the first American scientist to discover planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. Throughout this […]

Cosmic photo Album Earns Astronomer AAS Prize

A native of Italy, Tommaso Treu, now a UC Santa Barbara astrophysicist, earned degrees at University of Pisa and the Scuola Normale Superiore and was a graduate student at the Space Telescope Science Institute. His postdoctoral studies at the California Institute of Technology and as a Hubble fellow at UCLA exposed him to two of […]

Keck Observatory Featured in NOVA Documentary

PBS Hawai’i aired Hunting the Edge of Space, a documentary exploring how the telescope has expanded our view of the Universe. The program features planet hunter Geoff Marcy and his search with the Keck I telescope and its High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph, or HIRES, for planets similar to Earth. The documentary is now available to […]

Exploring New Worlds

On a clear, crisp evening, Geoff Marcy will walk outside and gaze up at the San Francisco night sky where he lives. He looks at the stars, but his mind is on the millions or even billions of planets that may orbit them. The distant worlds are so far away that they cannot be seen with the naked eye, but Marcy knows they exist. He can imagine them circling their stars.

Like most people, he wonders whether any of those distant worlds are like Earth. Yet, unlike most people, he has access to the world’s best telescopes, including Keck Observatory, to help answer this question.  Marcy has led the way in discovering planets of all types beyond our Solar System, including super-hot orbs larger than Jupiter and icy balls similar in size to Neptune. With Keck, he and his fellow astronomers recently found distant worlds not much larger than Earth orbiting stars similar to our Sun. Such a discovery leads Marcy to believe that within the next few years, they will find the “holy grail” of planet hunting—another Earth.