Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[eightfingers2.0]

Terracore: My thoughts exactly.

[TomK]

I'll try and post some stuff here soon that'll bring the thread back on topic. Sorry I haven't been able to do so, but I've been exceptionally busy at work. Thanks, HOTPE, for attempting to divert the recent posts to another thread, that was noticed and appreciated.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

You're welcome TomK.
Today we have some good interplanetary news, and some bad interplanetary news.
Farout has been officially surpassed.
Long live Farfarout:


In January 2018, scientists gazing out beyond the known objects of the Solar System spotted something new: A small object, seemingly bound in orbit around the Sun. Scientists nicknamed this speck 'Farfarout,' for its distant location from the star — about four times farther than Pluto is from the Sun.

Now, after years of follow-up observations, we can finally confirm: Farfarout is in fact a planetoid, and the most distant object in the Solar System.
Using the Subaru Telescope, an 8-meter telescope located on top of the dormant volcano Mauna Kea in Hawaii, scientists spotted the planetoid Farfarout.
Follow-up observations of the object determined its orbit, confirming that it is the furthest known object of the Solar System.

"A single orbit of Farfarout around the Sun takes a millennium," David Tholen, an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii, and a member of the team behind the discovery, said in a statement.
"Because of this long orbital period, it moves very slowly across the sky, requiring several years of observations to precisely determine its trajectory."

https://www.inverse.com/science/most-dis...discovered

[TomK]

It's a small world:

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2021/02/1...db9ee6dc8e

Sarah and I have known each other since we were five years old. We lived about a mile apart and went to the same schools from five to eighteen-years old and were also in the same classes until we went to different universities. I think it was in 1991 we bumped into each other at Honolulu airport, she was in the islands studying volcanism and I was on the way back from an observing trip on Mauna Kea.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

It's a small world:

Great story.  Old friends from school days grow up, and meet on the other side of this planet.  One discovers it’s an interplanetary world. The other, an interstellar world.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

The black hole Cygnus X-1 is far larger than previously thought, and Stephen Hawking lost his bet. 
If you watch the video, look for the graphic of the the Very Long Baseline Array's size, which is possible because the JCMT on Mauna Kea is a component.  The entirety of the VLBA is what made this discovery possible.  Now imagine if no telescopes in Hawaii could collaborate and the array becomes about half the size it is now, reducing it's effective range.*

Alex Tetarenko, who works at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), has been collaborating with an international team of researchers to analyze new observations of the first black hole ever detected, Cygnus X-1. Their research shows that the system contains the most massive stellar-mass black hole ever detected without the use of gravitational waves.
In this latest work, astronomers observed a full orbit of the black hole over a six day period using the Very Long Baseline Array — a continent-sized radio telescope made up of 10 dishes spread across the United States — together with a clever technique to measure distances in space.

“One of the telescopes in the Very Long Baseline Array is located in Hawaii on the slopes of Maunakea, and this antenna plays a critical role in making it possible to do this kind of science,” Tetarenko explained.

As the next generation of telescopes comes online, their improved sensitivity reveals the universe in increasingly more detail, leveraging decades of effort invested by scientists and research teams around the world to better understand the cosmos and the exotic and extreme objects that exist.

https://www.westhawaiitoday.com/2021/02/...-detected/

* One might call the insistence by some for removing telescopes on Mauna Kea... perhaps... shortsighted.

[terracore]

This video of the Mars descent is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qC4wdD14VzE

[Obie]

Pretty cool and amazing !

[terracore]

Stunning: https://www.hawaiitracker.com/posts/6038...0004a6817b

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

An unusual object has been spotted near Jupiter.  It's outgassing like a comet, but at a distance much farther from the sun than normally expected.  Hawaii's asteroid alert system with telescopes on Haleakala and Mauna Loa (yes, Mauna Loa) have been monitoring the object's shifting orbit. It's suggested that at some point in the future the object may go interstellar:

Simulations suggest the object originated in the icy Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, and then flew closer to the sun from a "bucket brigade" of comets kicked in to a region between Jupiter and Neptune. The object, called a "Centaur", will only stay by Jupiter for a couple of years before the planet punts it out of the Trojan zone and forces the outgassing object towards the sun, for further adventures.

Numerous telescopes caught P/2019 LD2 at various stages in its journey. The first to spot it in June 2019 was the University of Hawaii's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) telescope system in Hawaii, and the comet activity was spotted by Japanese amateur astronomer Seiichi Yoshida.
https://www.space.com/interstellar-comet...-asteroids

ATLAS - Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System
https://atlas.fallingstar.com/home.php