Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

This sadly, isn't about a discovery by Mauna Kea observatories, it's more of a complaint about Mauna Kea observatories, a challenge for you guys to try a little harder, maybe pick up your game.

I read yesterday (see link below) that micrometeorites are landing all over my roof, and sliding down with the leaves and other debris into my gutters. Space detritus is clogging my downspouts. Now given that Mauna Kea observatories have been blamed for all manner of nuisance and aggression including but not limited to; ground water pollution, generic desecration, potential military blitzkriegs, increase in geothermal electrical demand, etc, etc, I thought, why stop there? Let's add rain gutters to the list.

TomK, how is it possible you and your fellow astronomers allow this astronomical micrometeorite outer space trash to fall right past your telescopes and onto Big Island house roofs below? Oh I know, some of you study exoplanets, some focus on distant galaxies, pulsars, quasars and the like, so pass the buck if you must. I'll manage for now as the problem is at this point manageable. But in the future, should I ever find anything bigger, heavier, beyond micro-sized mixed in with the decomposing ohia leaves and Cook Island pine needles, for instance a nebula or black hole, you'll be hearing from me.

http://gizmodo.com/there-may-be-extrater...1792040670

"It doesn’t sound like a benefit when I can’t even understand it." -Brannon Kamahana Kealoha at the TMT Hearing

[TomK]

I'll talk to the other observatories and see if we can club together and buy a few hoses and brushes. We could hand them out to those affected to help clean their roofs. Sorry about that.

[mermaid53]

Originally posted by PaulW

60 Minutes last night had a piece on Planet 9 and Mauna Kea featured. They sounded very certain of themselves!

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-c...anet-nine/

This was interesting, thanks for sharing Paul. My husband's 2 x's great uncle discovered Pluto and you can imagine how the family felt when Pluto was downgraded to a moon after all those years...

Really enjoy this thread...Thanks TomK, Paul and others who contribute here.

[TomK]

Mermaid, I had no idea you might have a connection to Clyde Tombaugh! Lots of people were upset when Pluto was reclassified (to a dwarf planet, not a moon), but that's the way science works. I'm sure Tombaugh would have been disappointed, but would also have understood the scientific reasons.

No matter what, Pluto has turned out to be an extraordinary place and there's still much to learn. I don't know if you saw it, but there was a thread here not too long ago about the recent pass of Pluto by the New Horizons probe:

www.punaweb.org/Forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=21248

The probe is still operating as it gets farther from both Pluto and us, and think it's fitting that it contains some of Tombaugh's ashes so he remains part of the mission to explore the Kuiper Belt. The container has the inscription:

"Interned herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's "third zone." Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh (1906-1997)."

http://www.jhuapl.edu/newscenter/pressre...060203.asp

[mermaid53]

Thanks so much TomK. Thanks for the correction...dwarf planet. We really enjoyed both links. Truly amazing seeing Pluto's images and reading the bio of Clyde Tombaugh.

I agree, Clyde at first would've been disappointed but as an astronomer and scientist would've understood the reclassification. That's what science is all about...always changing w/new discoveries by others. But he passed away thinking Pluto is the 9th planet.

Very cool that his ashes are traveling in space and so fitting.

[TomK]

"I agree, Clyde at first would've been disappointed but as an astronomer and scientist would've understood the reclassification. That's what science is all about...always changing w/new discoveries by others."

Mermaid - I think the story about the discovery of Pluto, the later story of how it was found that the discovery was simply a coincidence (not that Tombaugh was to blame for that) and Pluto wasn't quite the planet it was supposed to be after the Voyager solar system missions is one of the best demonstrations of how science really works.

In the meantime, a discovery from the Kecks and Hubble:

"Hubble finds big brother of Halley’s Comet ripped apart by white dwarf"

http://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic1703/

"The international team of astronomers observed the white dwarf WD 1425+540, about 170 light-years from Earth in the constellation Boötes (the Herdsman) [1]. While studying the white dwarf’s atmosphere using both the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory the team found evidence that an object rather like a massive comet was falling onto the star, getting tidally disrupted while doing so."

https://phys.org/news/2017-02-hubble-wit...llute.html

"Dwarf star 200 light-years away contains life's building blocks"

"The scientists report that a minor planet in the planetary system was orbiting around the white dwarf, and its trajectory was somehow altered, perhaps by the gravitational pull of a planet in the same system. That change caused the minor planet to travel very close to the white dwarf, where the star's strong gravitational field ripped the minor planet apart into gas and dust. Those remnants went into orbit around the white dwarf—much like the rings around Saturn, Zuckerman said—before eventually spiraling onto the star itself, bringing with them the building blocks for life."

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

The HIRES data from Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea is now publicly available in order to help researchers find potential exoplanets. Download their Systemic Console 2 on your computer and start hunting interstellar planets from the comfort of home in Puna.
http://www.stefanom.org/console-2/

A little more info:
Today, a group of researchers led by the Carnegie Institute of Science released an impressive database containing 61,000 so-called Doppler velocity measurements of 1,600 nearby stars. The team is graciously inviting you to use their data to find the next exoplanet.

The data behind the new catalog was collected from 1994 to 2008 by the High Resolution Echelle Spectrometer (HIRES), located at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
http://gizmodo.com/scientists-need-your-...1792307596

No child will ever again doubt they could grow up and someday become president of the United States

[TomK]

Thanks for that, HOTPE. It's a bit of a shame the software only seems to be available for Macs and Unix. Hopefully, Windows will get added (for me, Unix is fine at work but at home it's all Windows).

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Here's another crowd sourced attempt to help astronomers, this one involves the search for objects on the distant edge of our solar system, and Planet 9.

In Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS survey uses a dedicated telescope on Haleakala to look for these orbiting bodies, while the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea performs a deeper but more highly targeted search.

How can you help?

"We need your help searching for new objects at the edges of our solar system. In this project, we'll ask you to help us distinguish real celestial objects from image artifacts in data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The real objects are brown dwarfs and low-mass stars, the Sun's nearest neighbors. You may find an object closer than Proxima Centauri (the closest star to the Sun) or even discover the Sun's hypothesized ninth planet, which models suggest might appear in these images.

Why This Search Requires Human Eyes
While it's possible to process the data to find moving points of light, we can't get rid of all the noise... These artifacts can easily fool our image processing software. But with your powerful human eyes, you can help us recognize real objects of interest that move among these artifacts."
https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marc...t/research

No child will ever again doubt they could grow up and someday become president of the United States

[PaulW]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/scien...speed.html

Interesting article, Hawaii's telescopes play a part again.
What say you about this, TomK?