Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[TomK]

Paul - it's not a done deal but no-one knows that yet. The observations carried out by the CFHT only throw some doubt on the existence of planet 9. I think we'll learn more in the next few months.

One of the problems about the search for the "9th planet" was the first search for the planet using Subaru didn't happen due to bad weather. There simply isn't enough observational data to know either way yet. They knew where to look for it, but couldn't.

[PaulW]

I found this to be a fascinating read about Eris (who? the ninth-most massive body in the Solar System, that's who)
and how it led to Pluto's downfall and the arguments about naming it. Good name though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eris_(dwarf_planet)
ETA: this one works: https://tinyurl.com/8y227ox

As always, our fantastic telescopes on Mauna Kea get a mention.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Oort cloud... SY99... Planet 9...

Fascinating stuff. Then in my inbox this morning I received a "Greatest Hits" twitter post for an earlier discovery by the Mauna Kea observatories. This one involved the distant objects around Neptune named Trojans*, discovered in collaboration with the New Horizons spacecraft on it's way to Pluto a few years ago:


So, what kind of serendipitous discovery did we make? We found a Neptune Trojan, now called 2011 HM102! And it's not just any Neptune Trojan: it makes a list of superlatives. It's the largest trailing Trojan known in the entire Solar System, it's the most inclined Neptune Trojan known, and (as of right now) it is the closest known object of any kind to the New Horizons spacecraft!

So how are we managing to find our wily little specks? First off, we need a lot of light-collecting power, so we need some of the largest telescopes in the world. Second, we have a relatively large area of sky to search - roughly 8-10 times the size of the full moon - so we need big imagers.

That limits the facilities we can use to just a few; the 3.5 meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) with its huge MegaPrime imager, the twin 6.5 meter Magellan telescopes with their three large-format imagers (IMACS f/2, IMACS f/4, and MegaCam), and the enormous 8.2 meter Subaru telescope with its SuprimeCam imager.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blo...anion.html

See the article for more info, and nice graphic showing fields of view for the two Mauna Kea telescopes and Magellan in Chile noted above.

* Previous post by TomK about Trojans: http://www.punaweb.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=22533&whichpage=20&SearchTerms=trojans

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

quote:

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Originally posted by gypsy69
Mahalo for sharing that wonderful video. One of my best friends helped produce that video, he spent three action packed weeks with the film crew. He said the trip or experience atop Mauna Kea in one of the observatories up there impressed him the most.

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I'm glad you enjoyed the video, and your friend his visits up Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. He's a great videographer! I hope he shares some of the other scenery he filmed on our Big Island mauna in the future.

On the fifth day - the scientists who studied the rivers - were forbidden to speak - or to study the rivers. -Jane Hirshfield's poem on creation

[MarkD]

To TomK and PaulW,

Sorry for intruding with unwanted viewpoints. Won't happen again.

I made some comments on this topic to Moderator on TMT poll site, in the event you are interested.

[PaulW]

MarkD, I understand your enthusiasm but Rob is a great moderator who administers this site for free.
He doesn't need anyone's advice on how to do it. Gypsy hijacks everything with his nonsense, best to just ignore him.

[TomK]

Thanks for that, HOTPE, it was an interesting read. As for the telescopes that could have been used, UKIRT with wide-field imager WFCAM would have been ideal for the search as it offers the same wide-field capabilities as the Magellan and CFHT. Its big advantage would have been it works in the near-infrared which is much more sensitive to light from cold objects such as the Trojans. However, at the time it appeared UKIRT was closing due to the withdrawal of the UK from MK telescopes, so probably wasn't considered. I can't recall if we got requests to join in the search.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

I read about an update of a discovery made almost 20 years ago at the 15-meter James Clerk Maxwell Telescope at the Mauna Kea Observatory. Excerpt from a report on the original discovery:

"Epsilon Eridani is far more similar to our Sun ... "This star system is a strong candidate for planets, but if there are planets, it's unlikely there could be life yet. When the Earth was this young, it was still being very heavily bombarded by comets and other debris."

"If an astronomer could have seen what our Solar System looked like four billion years ago, it would have been very much as Epsilon Eridani looks today
https://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news29.html


The latest studies reveal more detail about the planets and asteroid belt orbiting Epsilon Eridani. It appears to be a younger version of our own solar system, possibly showing how our planets may have developed long before life appeared on earth:

These observations further indicate that the Epsilon Eridani system is much like our own, albeit in younger form. In addition to having asteroid belts and a debris disk that is similar to our Main Belt and Kuiper Belt, it appears that it likely has more planets waiting to be found within the spaces between. As such, the study of this system could help astronomers to learn things about the history of our own Solar System.

“This star hosts a planetary system currently undergoing the same cataclysmic processes that happened to the solar system in its youth, at the time in which the moon gained most of its craters, Earth acquired the water in its oceans, and the conditions favorable for life on our planet were set.”
https://www.universetoday.com/135436/10-...ar-system/

All of this was made possible through cooperation between astronomers using different types of telescopes around the world, each capable of distinguishing and revealing distinctive aspects of the Epsilon Eridani system.

This is exciting stuff. With better telescopes planned for the future, bigger telescopes, space based telescopes, and perhaps additional methods of detecting light, temperature, and other measurable wavelengths over vast distances in space, might we discover our own past history in other places around the galaxy?

If I know what I shall find, I do not want to find it. Uncertainty is the salt of life. - biochemist Erwin Chargaff

[TomK]

Wow, that brings back memories! At the time of the discovery, the Joint Astronomy Centre ran both the JCMT and UKIRT and we were all JAC employees (and friends - we still are btw!).

This was back in the late 90s shortly after I had moved here and at a time when evidence for exoplanets was weak but was starting to create interest. At the time, I think this was the first strong evidence of another solar system, albeit very young, around a nearby star. It made news all over the world.

Things have moved on, obviously, but it was a major discovery back then.

http://www.eaobservatory.org/jcmt/public/jcmt/
http://www.eaobservatory.org/JCMT/public...mt-n11.pdf (page 44)

[TomK]

"Ripples in the Cosmic Web"

Another recent result, this time from the Keck Observatory on MK.

"“One reason these small-scale fluctuations are so interesting is that they encode information about the temperature of gas in the cosmic web just a few billion years after the Big Bang,” explained Hennawi.

Astronomers believe that the matter in the universe went through phase transitions billions of years ago, which dramatically changed its temperature. These phase transitions, known as cosmic re-ionization, occurred when the collective ultraviolet glow of all stars and quasars in the universe became intense enough to strip electrons off atoms in intergalactic space."

http://www.keckobservatory.org/recent/en...cosmic_web

Basically, the early universe after the big bang was completely opaque to light. It was still "small" and packed with mostly hydrogen that was ionized by UV light. The released electrons from those atoms meant the place was so crowded light couldn't get anywhere before "bumping" into something. After about 300,000 years, the universe had cooled enough for the electrons to recombine with hydrogen ions and light could escape (this is the earliest we can look back). After this, things started happening which resulted in stars and galaxies starting to form, which then sent their light out to ionize atoms again (i.e., a phase change).

These ripples can be used to finally figure out exactly when and how this happened and how our current universe came to be.