Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[TomK]

One thing all the internships and scholarships the observatories fund and take part in is that they teach the skill of communicating clearly with others. This is a skill that will benefit both the student and everyone else, especially if the student wishes to apply their talents and not be seen as a gibbering moron.

[HiloJulie]

I am sure this will be a huge boost!

And very well deserved!

"University of Hawai‘i Institute for Astronomy astronomer Michael Bottom and his research team are developing the next generation of ultra-sensitive sensors necessary to observe distant Earth-like exoplanets and their atmospheres. Their mission recently got a $4 million boost thanks to a NASA grant."

https://bigislandnow.com/2023/06/27/4m-n...xoplanets/

[TomK]

Thanks for your post HiloJulie. Yes, this is huge boost for the IfA and associated infrared telescopes owned by the UH/IfA. It also means there are funds for local STEM students to start their careers.

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

Forbidden Planet.
If should have been consumed by the sun it orbits, but surprisingly survives.  There may be other similar planets in other solar systems:

Halla is “a forbidden planet of sorts,” said Marc Hon, a NASA Hubble fellow at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and an author of the study. “The star itself might have a very unusual history that somehow permitted this planet to survive at such a close distance around what is otherwise a rather inhospitable host star,” he added.

By the time most red giants dip into their helium supply, they have already ballooned in size by orders of magnitude. In other words, Halla, which occupies a tight 93-day orbit, ought to be in Baekdu’s belly right now. But when Dr. Hon and his colleagues conducted follow-up observations with ground telescopes in Hawaii, they saw that Halla was still there, intact and flouting all expectations.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/scien...eakdu.html

[TomK]

Saved me the effort. Thanks, HOTPE!

From Keck: https://www.keckobservatory.org/halla/

[TomK]

"Why Saturn's moons have been so hard to find"

For those interested, this is a nicely written article about discovering moons around the gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn and, to some extent, Uranus and Neptune) that involves observations carried out on Mauna Kea.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230...-from-view

"The new moons were located by a team led by Edward Ashton, a postdoctoral fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan. The discovery took more than two years using a telescope on top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. But it came after astronomers have been peering at Saturn and its satellites for more than three and a half centuries. Humanity has even sent four spacecraft to Saturn, and still these moons escaped discovery."

[TomK]

The possibility of life on Venus continues.

Going back a few years:

https://punaweb.org/forum/showthread.php?tid=17412&pid=326421&highlight=phosphine#pid326421

Since that time there has been a lot of work and debate about whether the observations are reliable, whether they indicate life and all sorts of other very interesting discussions about what the potential discovery of phosphine in the Venusian upper atmosphere implies. Now, further observations and analysis using the JCMT on Mauna Kea that appear to show phosphine in the lower regions of Venus' atmosphere have been announced.

"Life on Venus? Intriguing molecule phosphine spotted in planet's clouds again"

"In September 2020, a team of scientists led by Jane Greaves of Cardiff University in Wales reported the detection of phosphine, a possible indicator of life, in the clouds of Venus. The announcement sparked a heated debate and a surge of follow-up studies, which have generally failed to spot the intriguing molecule in the Venusian atmosphere. 

Now there's a new twist. Speaking at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting 2023 in Cardiff this week, Greaves revealed the discovery of phosphine deeper in the atmosphere of Venus than it had been spotted before. Using the James Clark Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, Greaves and her colleagues delved into the atmosphere of Venus, down to the top and even the middle of the planet's clouds."

https://www.space.com/venus-clouds-phosp...nce-debate

[TomK]

"Big Island’s Maunakea is front-row seat to discovering what’s in the universe"

This is from Big Island Now. It appears they're starting a series of related articles with another coming next week.

"Simons, now the director of the University of Hawai’i Institute for Astronomy, was captivated by the mind-boggling physics occurring as the behemoth distorts space and time in that region of the universe — and the engineering feat required to capture its image. He thought: “Wow, it’s a different world.”
The first image of a black hole, given the Hawaiian name Pōwehi, joins other historic discoveries of astronomy:

• The first interstellar object to visit our solar system, ‘Oumuamua, in 2017.
  
• The accelerated expansion of the universe, which led to a Nobel Prize in physics in 2011.
  
• The first image of the black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy.
  
• The recent discovery of a death defying planet orbiting a red giant star on its last legs.
  
• And even observations like a mysterious blue swirl or green laser lights in the night sky and unique weather phenomenon such as red sprites.
  

The discoveries all were possible because of powerful telescopes atop the Big Island’s nearly 14,000-foot Maunakea, which is revered worldwide as one of the best places for ground-based astronomy."


https://bigislandnow.com/2023/07/09/big-...-universe/

[TomK]

So, to be fair to everyone, I mentioned the above Big Island Now article was part of a weekly series. This is the next article in that series:

"Why Maunakea is sacred to many Native Hawaiians from their beginning to today"

https://bigislandnow.com/2023/07/16/why-...-to-today/

I won't discuss this here as it has nothing to do with discoveries made using the observatories on Mauna Kea, but if someone wants to start a new thread about this then fine. It would be nice if people follow the spirit of this thread if they want to comment.

[TomK]

"A rotating white dwarf shows different compositions on its opposite faces"

This one is really bizarre. A white dwarf star, which is essentially the type of star our sun will turn into when it's very old, has two sides to it; one is dominated by hydrogen and the other by helium. I've never heard of such a star before and it was astronomers using the Keck on Mauna Kea that discovered its two-faced nature.

"Here we report observations of ZTF J203349.8+322901.1, a transitioning white dwarf with two faces: one side of its atmosphere is dominated by hydrogen and the other one by helium. This peculiar nature is probably caused by the presence of a small magnetic field, which creates an inhomogeneity in temperature, pressure or mixing strength over the surface9,10,11. ZTF J203349.8+322901.1 might be the most extreme member of a class of magnetic, transitioning white dwarfs—together with GD 323 (ref. 12), a white dwarf that shows similar but much more subtle variations. This class of white dwarfs could help shed light on the physical mechanisms behind the spectral evolution of white dwarfs."

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06171-9

Big Island Now also has an article about it.

https://bigislandnow.com/2023/07/19/unus...-maunakea/