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MEDIA RELEASE With data collected from the mighty W. M. Keck Observatory, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer Mike Brown — known as the Pluto killer for discovering a Kuiper-belt object that led to the demotion of Pluto from planetary status — and Kevin Hand from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have found the strongest […]

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Wizinowich: ‘Ever since Galileo, astronomers have been building bigger telescopes to collect more light to observe more distant objects’

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MEDIA RELEASE Astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii and W. M. Keck Observatory telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii have been amazed to find a group of dwarf galaxies moving in unison in the vicinity of the Andromeda Galaxy. The structure of these small galaxies lies in a plane, analogous to the planets of the […]

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‘Tau Ceti is one of our nearest cosmic neighbors and so bright that we may be able to study the atmospheres in the not too distant future’

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MEDIA RELEASE Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and other telescopes on Mauna Kea have studied a giant filament of dark matter in 3D for the first time. Extending 60 million light-years from one of the most massive galaxy clusters known, the filament is part of the cosmic web that […]

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MEDIA RELEASE The W. M. Keck Observatory has been awarded two major grants to help build a $4 million laser system as the next leap forward in a technology which already enables ground-based telescopes to exceed the observational power of telescopes in space. The new laser, when installed on the current adaptive optics system on […]

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Once-in-a-lifetime astronomical event plays out June 5

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MEDIA RELEASE When astronomers add up all the gas and dust contained in ordinary galaxies like our own Milky Way, they stumble on a puzzle: There is not nearly enough matter for stars to be born at the rates that are observed. Part of the solution might be a recycling of matter on gigantic scales […]

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MEDIA RELEASE A Keck Observatory astronomer who led the way to the discovery of a super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy has been recognized with the 2012 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, an award almost as prestigious for astronomers as a Nobel Prize. “This is a big one. I’m thrilled,” said Andrea Ghez […]

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MEDIA RELEASE The Keck I telescope has been used to confirm the mass of a planet in the habitable zone around a star—that’s the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. The newly confirmed exoplanet, Kepler-22b, is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle of the habitable zone of a […]

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MEDIA RELEASE Astronomers using the Keck II telescope and other observatories have discovered the largest black holes to date—two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion Suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, within a region five times the size of our solar system. These black holes are at the centers of two […]

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MEDIA RELEASE A whopping 18 new, bona fide exoplanets have been discovered and confirmed by a team of Caltech astronomers using the Keck Telescopes and two other ground-based observatories. “It’s the largest single announcement of planets in orbit around stars more massive than the sun, aside from the discoveries made by the Kepler mission,” said […]

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Discovery reveals how different the early universe was from today

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The first direct image of a planet in the process of forming around its star has been captured by astronomers who combined the power of the 10-meter Keck telescopes with a bit of optical sleight of hand. Artist credit above by Karen L. Teramura, UH IfA

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