Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[mella l]

Thank you for bringing this forward. I'll enjoy the entire thread over time. Have the observatories in Hawaii studied KIC 8462852?

mella l
Art and Science
bytheSEA

[TomK]

Thought it might be appropriate to start posting the odd update given things are relatively unchanged with the eruption in Puna, but will only do the odd update that people might see in the news for now.

Mella - just to answer your question, I don't know right now but know it's making news every so often. I'll try and find out (KIC 8462852 is Tabby's star which a few people thought might be caused by an alien structure around the star - a Dyson Sphere, but that's very unlikely).

AT2018cow is making the news right now, e.g.,

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/a...-away.html

The object is a real mystery. It was discovered about a week ago by the Keck on MK and is being followed up by other telescopes on the mountain. At UKIRT, we're actually observing the object as I write this and have been doing each night for a few nights and will continue to do so each night for a while. It's a bizarre object that could be several different things, but right now no-one knows what it really is.

Wikipedia probably has the most up-to-date publicly available information right now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT2018cow

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Update on interstellar object Oumuamua

Rob Weryk was looking at the observations recorded by a telescope perched on top of a volcano in Hawaii (and) noticed an unusual object. Unlike everything else in our solar system, it didn’t seem to be orbiting the sun. It was zooming across the night sky, carving out its own path through our little home in the universe.

... then they started to see something strange in their data, particularly from the Hubble Space Telescope, which continued to track Oumuamua after it faded from view from even the most powerful ground-based telescopes ... “the path was not behaving as it would if it were just merely controlled by the sun’s gravity,” says Karen Meech, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, and one of the discoverers of Oumuamua. Something else was giving Oumuamua an extra push.

If you guessed that extra push was a rocket engine, you wouldn't be all that far off. It was caused by a more natural phenomenon known as outgassing (and without an interstellar Scotty "giv'n her all she's got, captain") changing it's trajectory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...et/563858/

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner”... invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard

[mella l]

Thanks TomK. The last I heard of KIC 8462852 Tabby's star was speculation of dust clouds and that a specific instrument was going to study the properties of the supposed dust/gas clouds. A spectrometer or some such devise. Thanks for the link and a look at "the cow" like in holy cow!

mella l
Art and Science
bytheSEA

[TomK]

Haven't read the article, HOTPE, so perhaps it's discussed there, but if true that would strongly suggest it's a comet rather than an asteroid.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

that would strongly suggest it's a comet rather than an asteroid.

Yes, that seems the likeliest explanation at the moment. It would differ from local comets in at least one respect, as it didn’t have a recognizable tail, but that could be due to a number of factors encountered in interstellar space. It’s a unique object whatever it is, and It’s discovery has astronomers watching for others like it visiting our solar system, with the possibility that there’s one passing through at any given time.

At the link I posted previously there’s an animation showing Oumuamua’s trajectory entering and leaving our system. Quite a slingshot effect.

I alternate between thinking of the planet as home — dear and familiar stone hearth and garden — and as a hard land of exile in which we are all sojourners. Today I favor the latter view. The word “sojourner”... invokes a nomadic people’s sense of vagrancy, a praying people’s knowledge of estrangement, a thinking people’s intuition of sharp loss: “For we are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers: our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding.” - Annie Dillard

[TomK]

Mella - just to answer your question about Tabby's star: The IRTF on MK has studied it in the infrared looking for debris around the star (i.e., looking for infrared emission from warm dust around the star) but found nothing significant. As for other studies, I don't think the MK observatories have played much of a part. I suspect the reason for this is the star is quite bright so there's no reason to use the large telescopes to observe it; smaller telescopes around the world are quite capable of obtaining data on the star and easier to get time on. Observing the star on the MK telescopes would take time away from observing much fainter things.

Just looking at the star's magnitude (its brightness), it would be very close to UKIRT's saturation limit, i.e., the point we couldn't observe the star because it's too bright, at least while we're in wide-field mode (which we have been for nearly two years). So it's much more sensible to use smaller telescopes elsewhere.

[mermaid53]

Just wanted to say to those that enjoy this thread that I haven't abandoned it

Tom, just wanted to say that I appreciate the information that you, and HOTPE share here on this thread...

Mahalo

[TomK]

Thanks, Mermaid, always glad to hear that people enjoy the information in this thread.

[mella l]

Thanks Tom for the explanation! We learn something every day!

mella l
Art and Science
bytheSEA