Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[SBH]

Thanks Tom, pretty exciting!

[PaulW]

Great stuff! Amazing what they can deduce from a slight dimming of light.

They should send the telephone sanitizers there to take a closer look.

[TomK]

The NASA press release was, I suppose, rather biased towards the NASA observatories that were involved. On the other hand, ESO's press release did at least mention all the other telescopes involved:

http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1706/

[TomK]

A massive number of astronomical images made available to the public.

Wide-field survey data from The Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea using the Hyper Suprime-Cam have been released to the general public. There are a lot of images to look through and play around with if you want!

https://phys.org/news/2017-02-hyper-supr...tegic.html

"Figuring out the fate of the Universe is one step closer. The first massive dataset of a "cosmic census" is released using the largest digital camera on the Subaru Telescope. Beautiful images are available for public at large.

The first dataset from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) was released to the public on February 27th, 2017. HSC-SSP is a large survey being done using HSC, which is an optical imaging camera mounted at the prime focus of the Subaru Telescope. HSC has 104 scientific CCDs (for a total of 870 million pixels) and a 1.77 square-degree field of view."

Direct Subaru link:

http://www.naoj.org/Topics/2017/02/27/index.html

[Lodestone]

Thanks Tom! Great images. A tad disturbing that the x-axis on all the graphs is named "Galactic Extinction"... that would be an excellent name for a heavy metal band.

[TomK]

Thanks, Lodestone, and I agree that'd be a great name!

"Galactic extinction" is a term an astronomer would understand, but not one a layperson would necessarily know. It's a number that tells you how much light is scattered or blocked by material in our own galaxy. The lower the number, the more light gets through from outside the Milky Way. As you might imagine, if you looked into our galaxy's disk, that number would be high as you're looking through tens of thousands of light years of stuff, but if you look directly out of the disk, then there is much less gas and dust so much more light gets through.

I can provide a technical explanation of what E(B-V) is, but assume most aren't that interested, so I'll only do so if someone asks.

[mermaid53]

quote:

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Originally posted by TomK
Direct Subaru link:

http://www.naoj.org/Topics/2017/02/27/index.html

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Mahalo for providing this link. The tadpole galaxy is simply amazing!

[Lodestone]

Mahalo Tom. Glad to know that "Galactic Extinction" means something besides a horrible prospect for all concerned, and am enlightened to realize that you guys have to correct for how much of the Milky Way you are peering thru. I'd call it Milky Way Mistiness, but that's just me.

[TomK]

This news from the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea has been reported by a local news organization - Big Island Now:

http://bigislandnow.com/2017/03/08/nasa-...ngerprint/

"NASA Study: Possible Change in Lovejoy’s Water ‘Fingerprint’"

Very brief summary: We've known for decades that comets contain water and might have played a major role in delivering water to our planet when the solar system was young, but this is the first time water seems to have been processed by the sun that resulted in an enhanced abundance of HDO (heavy water) relative to "normal" water. This is a new discovery and may lead to a new understanding of how life formed in our solar system, and how it may form in other systems. It's a bit of a surprise since we always knew that the amount of water produced by a comet varied as it came closer to the sun, but HDO varied the same way. This time it didn't.

What we don't know yet is if this is normal and we just haven't been able to measure the abundance of HDO accurately before or if the interaction between Comet Lovejoy and the sun was unique.

[TomK]

Stars being destroyed by massive black holes

This study involved the Kecks on Mauna Kea, but whoever hired the person to create the "artist's impression" seems to have accidently employed someone more expert in painting strange deep-sea monsters...

https://phys.org/news/2017-03-tidal-disr...vents.html