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Science News
A Tale of Planetary Resurrection
Years after its detection, astronomers have learned that a planet called KOI-5Ab orbits in a triple-star system with a skewed configuration. Maunakea, Hawaii – Shortly after NASA’s Kepler mission began operations back in 2009, it identified what was thought to be a planet about the size of Neptune. Called KOI-5Ab, the planet, which was the second […]
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A Rocky Planet Around One of Our Galaxy’s Oldest Stars
University of Hawaiʻi Astronomers Using W. M. Keck Observatory Discover Ancient Magma World Orbiting a Chemically Unusual Star Maunakea, Hawaiʻi – “They should have sent a poet,” says Ellie Arroway in the film Contact as, suspended in outer space, she gazes upon a spiral galaxy. Almost all of the planets discovered to date (including the […]
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Astronomers Spot Farthest Galaxy Known in the Universe
Maunakea, Hawaii – An international team of astronomers using W. M. Keck Observatory have spectroscopic confirmation of the most distant astrophysical object known to date. The researchers, led by Professor Linhua Jiang at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, obtained near-infrared spectra with the Multi-Object Spectrograph for Infrared Exploration (MOSFIRE) on […]
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Direct Image of Newly-discovered Brown Dwarf Captured
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers using two Maunakea Observatories – Subaru Telescope and W. M. Keck Observatory – have discovered a key benchmark brown dwarf orbiting a Sun-like star just 86 light-years from Earth that provides a key reference point for understanding the properties of the first directly-imaged exoplanets. Subaru Telescope first detected and captured remarkably […]
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16-year-old Cosmic Mystery Solved, Revealing Stellar Missing Link
The Blue Ring Nebula, which perplexed scientists for over a decade, appears to be the youngest known example of two stars merged into one Maunakea, Hawaii – In 2004, scientists with NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spotted an object unlike any they’d seen before in our Milky Way galaxy: a large, faint blob of […]
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Unexplained Brightness from Colossal Explosion
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers have discovered the brightest infrared light from a short gamma-ray burst ever seen, with a bizarre glow that is more luminous than previously thought was possible. Its half-second flash of light, detected in May of this year, came from a violent explosion of gamma rays billons of light-years away that unleashed […]
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Galaxies In The Infant Universe Were Surprisingly Mature
Maunakea, Hawaii – In the first and largest multi-wavelength survey of distant galaxies in the early universe ever conducted, an international team of astronomers has discovered that massive galaxies were already much more mature in the early universe than previously expected. The survey, called ALPINE (the ALMA Large Program to Investigate C+ at Early Times), […]
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Active volcanoes feed Io’s sulfurous atmosphere
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers have made a breakthrough in understanding how volcanic activity directly affects the atmosphere of Jupiter’s moon Io. In a remarkable first, new radio images from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile show plumes of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and sulfur monoxide (SO) gas spewing from Io’s volcanoes and into its […]
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Anemic Star Cluster Breaks Metal-poor Record
Maunakea, Hawaii – In a surprising discovery, astronomers using two Maunakea Observatories – W. M. Keck Observatory and Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) – have found a globular star cluster in the Andromeda Galaxy that contains a record-breaking low amount of metals. The stars in the cluster, called RBC EXT8, have on average 800 times less iron […]
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Unraveling a Spiral Stream of Dusty Embers from a Massive Binary Stellar Forge
Maunakea, Hawaii – Astronomers using three Maunakea Observatories have discovered one of the most prolific dust-making Wolf-Rayet star systems known, remarkably producing an entire Earth mass of dust every year. With nearly two decades of images from the world’s largest observatories – including W. M. Keck Observatory, Subaru Telescope, and Gemini Observatory in Hawaii – […]
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