Keck – Page 41 – A Darker View

Reminder – Keck Lecture Tomorrow

Tom Soifer
Seeing the Invisible Universe

Kahilu Theater
Thursday, February 9
7:00pm

Astronomy is enjoying a golden age and the W M Keck Observatory is a world leader in cosmic exploration. With generous support from Rob and Terry Ryan, Keck Observatory invites you to take a journey beyond this world to the frontiers of discovery. Your guides are Keck’s astronomers. They will bring you a rich and varied Universe and an evening filled with beauty, drama, mystery and surprise.

Tom Soifer is professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and the Director of the Spitzer Science Center. He is also the Chair of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech and a member of the Board of Directors of the W. M. Keck Observatory. The Spitzer Space Telescope is NASA’s latest Great Observatory, designed to explore the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Spitzer was launched in August of 2003. In his talk, Soifer will describe some of the most exciting results from the Spitzer mission, among its many discoveries have been measuring the thermal emission and spectra from hot Jupiters orbiting other stars, finding “Fullerene (buckyball)” molecules in space, observing prebiotic molecules in galaxies seen less than 3 billion years after the big bang, and measuring the masses of the most distant and youngest galaxies known.

There is no charge for admission to any events in the Makana series.

Presented by W.M. Keck Observatory.

Super-Earth Detected in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

An international team of scientists has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. With an orbital period of about 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times that of the Earth, the planet orbits within the star’s “habitable zone,” where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface. The researchers found evidence of at least one and possibly two or three additional planets orbiting the star, which is about 22 light years from Earth.

The researchers used public data from the European Southern Observatory and analyzed it with a novel data-analysis method. They also incorporated new measurements from the W. M. Keck Observatory’s High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph (HiRES) and the new Carnegie Planet Finder Spectrograph at the Magellan II Telescope. Their planet-finding technique involved measuring the small wobbles in a star’s motion caused by the gravitational tug of a planet.

The team includes UC Santa Cruz astronomers Steven Vogt and Eugenio Rivera and was led by Guillem Anglada-Escudé and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution for Science. Their work will be published by Astrophysical Journal Letters, and the manuscript will be posted online at arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph.

The host star is a member of a triple-star system and has a different makeup than our sun, with a much lower abundance of elements heavier than helium, such as iron, carbon, and silicon. This discovery indicates that potentially habitable planets can occur in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

Continue reading “Super-Earth Detected in Habitable Zone of Nearby Star”

Keck Lecture at Kahilu February 9th

Tom Soifer
Seeing the Invisible Universe

Kahilu Theater
Thursday, February 9
7:00pm

There is no charge for admission to any events in the Makana series.

Presented by W.M. Keck Observatory.

The Flight of OSIRIS

An incredible amount of planning and work went into the job, with everything culminating in a few days of frenetic activity. Often referred to as “twins”, the Keck telescopes seem anything but. Over the years these once identical twins have taken on their own characteristics. One of the things that differentiates the two, each has its own set of unique instruments. Cameras and spectrographs, these multimillion dollar devices allow the recording and studying of the light collected by the massive 10-meter mirrors. This week we moved one of these instruments from Keck 2 to Keck 1… OSIRIS.

OSIRIS is an infrared integral field spectrograph. Designed to take full advantage of the Keck Adaptive Optics systems, the instrument has a relatively small field of view. Within that small field it does amazing things, providing a simultaneous spectrum and image of an object. Essentially it takes a stack of images at the same time, each at a different wavelength. This gives astronomers a very powerful tool. One image will show the distribution of particular elements throughout an object. Using doppler shift, an astronomer can also observe how everything is moving within the object as well.

The Keck crew lowering OSIRIS into Keck 1 AO

Moving an instrument is not a trivial job. It is not simply a matter of unplugging the instrument and moving it to the other telescope. Each instrument has a tremendous amount of infrastructure required to support it. Electrical wiring, optical fibers, plumbing for the cooling systems, support computers, and more… All of it has to be moved.

OSIRIS has been a removable instrument, mounted to a handling cart for easy removal and installation into the telescope. The new installation will be a permanent mount within the AO enclosure. A new mount must be designed and fabricated. New support beams welded and bolted into place. There are openings to be cut into the floor for the mounts and support connections. Then all of the electrical, optical cabling and plumbing run through the structure of the telescope. This all has to be designed, reviewed and then the modifications performed without interfering with nightly observing. The amount of work is truly daunting, and thanks to the efforts of a great crew, now complete.

Continue reading “The Flight of OSIRIS”

Keck Observatory Astronomer Wins Top Award

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

A Keck Observatory astronomer who led the way to the discovery of a super-massive black hole at the center of our galaxy has been recognized this week with the 2012 Crafoord Prize in Astronomy, an award almost as prestigious for astronomers as a Nobel Prize.

“This is a big one. I’m thrilled,” said Andrea Ghez of the University of California at Los Angeles. For more than 16 years Ghez and her team have been pushing the frontiers of high-resolution imaging technologies with the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes in order to explore the center of the Milky Way. By tracking the rapid, small-scale orbits of stars at the Galactic Center, they discovered the presence of a source of tremendous gravity – the best evidence yet that a supermassive black hole exists there. The reality of such an object confronts and challenges our knowledge of fundamental physics.

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Most Distant Dwarf Galaxy Detected

W. M. Keck Observatory Press Release…

Scientists have long struggled to detect the dim dwarf galaxies that orbit our own galaxy. So it came as a surprise on Jan. 18 when a team of astronomers using Keck II telescope’s adaptive optics has announced the discovery of a dwarf galaxy halfway across the universe.

The new dwarf galaxy found by MIT’s Dr. Simona Vegetti and colleagues is a satellite of an elliptical galaxy almost 10 billion light-years away from Earth. The team detected it by studying how the massive elliptical galaxy, called JVAS B1938 + 666, serves as a gravitational lens for light from an even more distant galaxy directly behind it. Their discovery was published in the Jan. 18 online edition of the journal Nature.

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Laser Return Photometery

A different use for amateur astrophotography gear.

An amateur CCD camera can do more than take pretty pictures. There is no reason why any decent telescope, however small, and a CCD camera can not be used to do real science, or real engineering in this case.

The goal of the night was to perform proper photometry on the laser returns with independent equipment. We want to quantify the performance of the Keck adaptive optics laser systems. We launch two powerful lasers into the sky, one from each telescope, to allow analysis of the atmospheric distortions through which the telescope is observing. Using the data the system can correct for this atmospheric distortion and create much sharper images of distant stars and galaxies.

The lasers pass through a layer of sodium atoms about 90km (55miles) above the ground. There the 589nm yellow light excites these sodium atoms creating a glowing beacon, what we call the laser return. This return is what we look at to analyze atmospheric distortion. A brighter return allows better data and better performance of the system.

Both the Keck 1 and Keck 2 lasers in operation under the light of a nearly full Moon

Amateur astrophotography gear is perfectly capable of doing this task. A portable telescope, a proper CCD camera, combined with care to acquire calibrated images. All that I needed to add to the setup was a photometric V filter.

It was a perfect night for it, clear, dry and cold. Best of all, there was no wind to bounce the telescope around and chill anyone working outside. The winds are nearly constant atop at 14,000ft peak, calm nights are unusual, I was lucky indeed.

I setup the telescope atop a crust of ice and snow. The snow was convenient as it allowed me to set down gear on a cleaner surface than the gritty volcanic cinder underneath, keeping everything quite a bit cleaner. The altitude and cold made setup and breakdown a slow, laborious process, and added unique difficulties. I had to be very careful moving the heavy gear, so as not to slip on the icy snow. When I went to move the telescope tripod I found it frozen into the snow and cinder! I had to heave hard to break it free.

Continue reading “Laser Return Photometery”

Small Solar System Found

For years the search for exoplanets has largely been like Gulliver’s visit to Brobdingnag: colossal systems of giant gas planets orbiting mammoth stars. But astronomers have finally landed on the shores of Lilliput. They have found a tiny star with three puny planets, each smaller than Earth, zooming around it.

The three small exoplanets orbit a star called KOI-961. Their radii are calculated to be 78, 73 and 57 percent that of Earth. The sizes of the planets were worked out by Kepler Telescope observations that measured the dimming of the star KOI-961 as each planet passes in front of it. This plus crucial information about the star from Keck and Palomar telescopes enabled researchers to determine the sizes of the planets.

Although the masses of the three planets are unknown, they are suspected of being rocky, like Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury. But they orbit too close to their star to be in the habitable zone where liquid water could exist. The three planets take less than two days to orbit around KOI-961, which is a red dwarf with a diameter one-sixth that of our sun, making it just 70 percent bigger than Jupiter.

“This is the tiniest solar system found so far,” said John Johnson, the principal investigator of the research from NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “It’s actually more similar to Jupiter and its moons in scale than any other planetary system. The discovery is further proof of the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy.”

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Employment at Keck – Electronics Engineer

W. M. Keck Observatory position announcement…

The W.M. Keck Observatory seeks an Electronics Engineer to join a multi-disciplinary engineering team that operates, maintains, and improves high-technology systems at the observatory including telescope controls, primary mirror controls, adaptive optics and more. This is a challenging fast-paced technical environment where teamwork, and interpersonal communication are essential skills.

The observatory operates two of the largest and most scientifically productive optical/infrared telescopes in the world. The twin 10-meter telescopes are located amidst several other world class observatories on the summit of Mauna Kea, at 13,796 feet above sea level on the Big Island of Hawaii, one of the premier sites for astronomy. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to join a skilled and deeply committed team of technical professionals who enable exciting and important astronomical discoveries.

Qualifications for this position include a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering with emphasis in electronics and control systems and five years of work experience designing, building, analyzing, testing and troubleshooting of electronics and electromechanical systems. The ideal candidate will have a strong understanding of analog and digital electronics, real-time PID motion control systems, computer interfaces, noise, shielding and grounding principles, and be well organized and have good documentation skills. Desirable skills include project planning and management, configuration management, and knowledge of electronics and electrical engineering standards. Because of the observatory’s location, a significant amount of time will be spent working at high altitude.

This position requires you to submit your resume on-line at: http://keckobservatory.iapplicants.com/ViewJob-262125.html with your cover letter that states why you are uniquely qualified for the position.

Additional information about WMKO and this position may be found on our website at www.keckobservatory.org EEO/M/F/D/V

Science Illiteracy at the Star-Advertiser

We do like it when Keck Observatory is featured in the local papers. We are proud of the ‘scopes and take notice when we get some good press. The Star-Advertiser is the major daily paper for Honolulu and much of the state. I have even had some of my photographs published in the paper. Another article about Keck appeared today, but this time they simply display their ignorance of basic science.

Keck telescope helps discover 3 small planets outside Milky Way

The headline quickly had my attention. Exoplanet discoveries are coming fast with the Kepler Spacecraft / Keck Observatory team confirming alien worlds at a breakneck pace. It was the “outside the Milky Way” part that had my attention. I had no idea our current technology was capable of that! KOI-961 is a red-dwarf, a small, fairly dim class of star. It is difficult to even detect these stars at great distances, much less get the data needed to confirm orbiting planets. Something wrong here.

I double checked other sources… KOI-961 is actually fairly close to us in galactic terms, a mere 130 light years away. Given that the Milky Way Galaxy is well over 100,000 light years across, it puts KOI-961 well inside our galaxy. The article is actually reasonable, it appears to have simply taken the information from a press release, hard to screw up a cut and paste job. The headline however is where they stumbled hard.

Someone at the Star-Advertiser needs to take a basic astronomy course. Or maybe, simply check Wikipedia!

Update… They have fixed it. I forwarded the link to Larry O’Hanlon, the Keck PIO, whom I work with regularly. He called the S-A and apparently pointed out the issue. I would have loved to listen in on that conversation. The headline and text are edited now on the S-A website, but I kept a screenshot…