Tayte Brock

Aloha to our scientific colleagues around the world, On behalf of the more than 500 people employed by the Maunakea Observatories, we offer a perspective about the Maunakea situation with the sincere hope that our words encourage greater understanding of the complex circumstances in which we find ourselves. Staff members of the Maunakea Observatories, many of whom are born and […]

By Doug Simons, Executive Director of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. Since the state announced construction restart plans of the Thirty Meter Telescope, uncertainty about what lies ahead on Maunakea abounds. Conflicts and protests on the mountain in 2014 and 2015 frame our expectations of 2019, and perhaps beyond. As a longtime member of our community and Maunakea Observatory director who witnessed […]

James Clerk Maxwell Telescope & Submillimeter Array Help Unlock One of the Universe’s Greatest Mysteries Two of the world’s most powerful telescopes, located atop Maunakea, played a vital role in producing the world’s very first image of a black hole. Hawai‘i-based James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and Submillimeter Array (SMA) are part of the unprecedented Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project. […]

Astronomers have discovered a new object at the edge of our Solar System. The new extremely distant object far beyond Pluto has an orbit that supports the presence of a larger Planet X. The newly found object, called 2015 TG387, was announced by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center on Monday, October 1, 2018. A paper with the full […]

Maunakea, Hawaii – Galaxies and dark matter go hand in hand; you typically don’t find one without the other. So when researchers uncovered a galaxy, known as NGC1052-DF2, that is almost completely devoid of the stuff, they were shocked. “Finding a galaxy without dark matter is unexpected because this invisible, mysterious substance is the most dominant aspect of any galaxy,” said […]

Maunakea, Hawaii – When it comes to extrasolar planets, appearances can be deceiving. Astronomers have imaged a new planet, and it appears nearly identical to one of the best studied gas-giant planets. But this doppelgänger differs in one very important way: its origin. “We have found a gas-giant planet that is a virtual twin of a previously known planet, but it […]

Through the use of GRACES – a fiber optic coupling of Gemini-N and CFHT –a star was detected that is moving at an extremely high velocity and will in fact escape our galaxy. It is theorized to be the result of a failed supernova explosion.

Keck and CFHT proved what separates real stars from wannabes through their observations of low mass stars and brown dwarfs. The lead astronomer (Trent Dupuy) is now at Gemini and Mike Liu is at the IfA. This is a definitive measurement of the lowest mass (and coolest surface temperature) that a star can have.