the latest news from the maunakea observatories
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Andrea Ghez Wins Nobel Prize In Physics
Dr. Andrea Ghez, an astrophysicist at UCLA who has been observing the Galactic Center from Maunakea for over two decades, has won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. She is honored for her pioneering work using W. M. Keck Observatory to provide conclusive experimental evidence of a supermassive black hole with the mass of four million suns residing at the center of our Milky Way galaxy.
April 12, 2022
Using the Subaru telescope on Maunakea, astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-like planet in the process of being formed in another solar system. This ground-breaking experiment provides evidence for a long-debated alternative theory for how Jupiter-like planets form. Read more, in the Subaru Telescope web release.
January 7, 2022
Astronomers have found the ruins of an ancient globular cluster in the outskirts of the Milky Way. Using the Canada-France-Hawaii and Gemini North telescopes on Maunakea, in conjunction with the Gaia satellite, they showed that the motions and compositions of stars in an outer-galaxy “stream” mean that it must have originated as a globular star cluster. In fact, this stream […]
January 7, 2022
Online viewers of the Subaru Telescope live stream were mesmerised by a cluster of more than a dozen meteors One Scouring through images from CFHT, Subaru and a number of other telescopes worldwide, an international team of astronomers has found the largest collection of free-floating “rogue” planets ever discovered, measuring their brightness, colour and miniscule motions across the sky. These […]
October 25, 2021
Online viewers of the Subaru Telescope live stream were mesmerised by a cluster of more than a dozen meteors One of the youngest planets ever observed around a distant star was recently discovered by an international team of scientists, using the Subaru and Keck observatories on Maunakea. The planet is several million years old, which is as young as the […]
October 20, 2021
Astronomers using the Keck observatory on Maunakea have observed a planetary system located near the center of our Milky Way galaxy and provided a glimpse into the (distant) future of our own Solar System. Read more, in the W M Keck Observatory press release.
August 6, 2021
Online viewers of the Subaru Telescope live stream were mesmerised by a cluster of more than a dozen meteors streaking across the dark Maunakea sky in quick succession, in the early hours of July 14th. The objects were also captured by the University of Hawaii’s all-sky camera on Haleakalā. The video is now being analyzed in detail by researchers. Read […]
July 27, 2021
Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (of which two Maunakea observatories are a part) have zoomed into Astronomers have discovered the shortest-ever gamma-ray burst (GRB) caused by the implosion of a massive star. Using the Gemini North telescope on Maunakea, astronomers identified the cause of this 0.6-second flurry of gamma rays as a supernova explosion in a distant galaxy. GRBs […]
July 21, 2021
Astronomers using the Event Horizon Telescope (of which two Maunakea observatories are a part) have zoomed into the heart of Centaurus A for the first time — at the center of which lies a black hole with the mass of 55 million suns. Read more, in the Submillimeter Array press release.
June 16, 2021
“We are normal!” - After thirty years of observational work, largely from Maunakea, astronomers reveal that the gas giant planets in many other solar systems lie at about the same distance from their stars as Jupiter does in our own solar system.