A team of Australian researchers used two Maunakea-based observatories – Gemini North and W. M. Keck Observatory – to discover why some galaxies are clumpy rather than spiral in shape and it appears that low spin is to blame. The finding challenges an earlier theory that high levels of gas cause clumpy galaxies, and sheds light on the conditions that brought about the birth of most of the stars in the Universe. The finding was published today in The Astrophysical Journal.
The massively star-forming galaxies analyzed in this study have clumpy, turbulent gas shown here in false colors. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory/Gemini Observatory/Hubble“This result was obtained by a unique and unusual combination of TWO large telescopes,”said Swinburne University astronomer Professor Karl Glazebrook, co-author and leader of the survey team “We used Keck adaptive optics to probe the fine details of galaxy rotation and Gemini to look at the large scale distribution. This made possible a result that was not before known about the spin of early primitive galaxies. It is one of the most exciting results of my career.”
A combination of integral field spectroscopy data from Keck Observatory and Gemini Observatory was the key to obtaining measurements for a galaxy’s spin. Keck Observatory’s OSIRIS instrument collected data high spatial resolution in the galaxy centers, and the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) collected data for high surface brightness sensitivity out to large radii.
Lead author Dr. Danail Obreschkow, from The University of Western Australia (UWA) node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), said that ten billion years ago the Universe was full of clumpy galaxies, but these developed into more regular objects as they evolved; the majority of stars in the sky today, including our five billion-year-old Sun, were probably born inside these clumpy galaxies.
Hawaii’s W. M. Keck Observatory has successfully deployed a $4 million laser system that provides a marked increase in the resolution and clarity of what are already the most scientifically productive telescopes on Earth. The new laser was projected on the sky for the first time on the evening of December 1, 2015 and will allow scientists from around the world to observe the heavens above Maunakea in unprecedented detail.
The Keck 2 AO laser works the northern sky“The Next Generation Laser System is the third generation of lasers at Keck Observatory, which has been pioneering Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics on big telescopes since 2001,” said Jason Chin, the project manager for the new laser at Keck Observatory.
The first Laser Guide Star Adaptive Optics system on a large telescope was commissioned on the Keck II telescope in 2004 and, among many other firsts, helped reveal the black hole at the center of the Milky Way – one the most significant astronomical discoveries. The second laser system was installed in 2011 on the Keck I telescope, propelling Keck Observatory’s lead as the premiere Adaptive Optics research facility in the world. To date more than 240 science results from these laser systems have been published in astronomical journals.
The Keck 2 AO laser works the northern skyThe W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has just been awarded the 2015 NASA Group Achievement Award for pioneering the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) ten years ago, which has significantly increased the impact of Keck Observatory data. The award was received by Keck Observatory Chief Scientist, Dr. Anne Kinney at NASA headquarters on December 8, 2015.
“For the past 10 years, the NASA KOA team has boosted the science value of data acquired at Keck Observatory by providing the scientific community with open access to WMKO data,” said Mario Perez, Keck Observatory Program Executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “They helped set a standard that all new ground based observatories are adopting. For this, the NASA KOA team has earned the NASA Group Achievement Award.”
“We are very proud of this award as well as the KOA project itself,” said Hilton Lewis, Director of W. M. Keck Observatory. “This was the brainchild of Anne Kinney while she was at NASA and who I am happy to report recently joined Keck Observatory as our Chief Scientist. Thanks to her vision, data gathered by all instruments at Keck Observatory is available for everyone to use. The Keck Observatory telescopes are the most scientifically productive on Earth, responsible for gathering data used in about 300 peer-reviewed scientific papers per year – almost one per night. There are terabytes of valuable data collected over the last 20 years waiting to be mined.”
In 2004, NASA established a partnership with WMKO to acquire large volumes of data from a single instrument, the High Resolution Spectrograph (HIRES), for NASA science purposes. It is standard practice to make data from NASA’s space telescopes available to the world in a public archive, but in 2004 it was unheard of to do the same with data from a ground-based telescope. Kinney, then Director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters, decided to start a visionary project of promoting public access to these data, and the project began by archiving NASA-acquired HIRES data.
Twenty-five years ago in 1990, the average US house cost $123,000, the Dow Jones averaged 2633 and gasoline cost a little more than a dollar-thirty a gallon. Saturn wasn’t just a planet: it was now a newly launched car company from GM, The Simpsons was aired for the first time and the Space Shuttle Discovery placed the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit.
The fifth grade class from Kohala Elementary reconstructed the Keck Observatory mirrors during the 25th anniversary of “First Light”, credit Andrew Hara / Ena Media HawaiiAnd it was the beginning of a golden age for astronomers: a perfect trifecta of advances in electronic instrumentation, computing power, and engineering were assembling to produce a new generation of telescopes – one that would radically change the way we understood the cosmos and the forces that drive it.
Want Of Light
Before the W. M. Keck Observatory was built, the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar Observatory reigned supreme. It was the largest telescope in the world, but after 50 years, progress in astronomy was flattening out because the instruments needed more photons than the 5-meter mirror could provide.
The biggest hindrance to an explosion of discoveries was a want of light and the telescopes themselves were the problem. Mirrors larger than Palomar’s could not be made and supported at the exacting levels needed for astronomy.
Every night, all over the world, people look up at the sky and wonder about the distant stars. Here in Hawaii we have the privilege of looking up at a very dark sky, but even here with the naked eye we can only see a few thousand stars. This is mainly because of the small size of the lens in our eye, which limits the amount of light it can gather, and also limits the detail we can see for those incredibly distant objects.
On November 24, 2015, Keck Observatory first observed the heavens above Maunakea, shooting Hawaii into the forefront of scientific research. Credit: W. M. Keck ObservatoryThis week we will celebrate the 25th anniversary of first light on the Keck I telescope, an event that started the process that has made Hawaii today the best-known place on earth for scientific discovery in astronomy, and the Keck Observatory the home of the two most scientifically productive telescopes on earth.
First light, the first time light from the night sky is focused into an image by a telescope, is a very special event for the community of people required to build and use them, accompanied by a nearly mystical sensation as it culminates years of dedication to completing the project and bringing the Universe a little closer to all humankind.
Since the invention of the telescope 400 years ago, we have been looking at the sky in with much bigger manmade eyes, seeking to learn more and more about our Universe. This has been possible because we have been able to build larger and larger telescopes. For a time telescopes were developed with either lenses or mirrors, but the understanding of telescope design improved, telescopes using mirrors became the choice for larger telescopes. In 1977 the largest telescope on earth was the Hale telescope at Mount Palomar, with a mirror 5 meters in diameter. Astronomers at the University of California knew that their research was reaching the limit of what could be done with the Hale and smaller telescopes, and so they started a project to design and build a 10 meter telescope. This was a very ambitious goal, since even the Hale was known to have limited performance because of the tendency of its mirror to change shape as the telescope was pointed at different places in the sky.
An international team of astronomers has discovered a distant massive galaxy cluster with a core bursting with new stars. The discovery, made with the help of the Maunakea-based W. M. Keck Observatory and Canada-France Hawaii Telescope, is the first to show that gigantic galaxies at the centers of massive clusters can grow significantly by feeding off gas stolen from other galaxies. The study has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
A massive cluster of galaxies, called SpARCS1049+56, can be seen in this multi-wavelength view from NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. Credit: NASA/STSCI/ESA/JPL-Caltech/McGill“Clusters of galaxies are rare regions of the Universe consisting of hundreds of galaxies containing trillions of stars, as well as hot gas and mysterious dark matter,” said the lead author, Tracy Webb of McGill University, Canada. “The galaxies at the centers of clusters, called Brightest Cluster Galaxies, are the most massive galaxies in the Universe. How they become so huge is not well understood.”
What is so unusual about SpARCS1049+56 is that it is forming stars at a prodigious rate, more than 800 solar masses per year – 800 times faster than in our own Milky Way.
This surprising new discovery was the result of collaborative synergy from ground-based observations from Keck Observatory and CFHT as well as space-based observations from NASA’s Hubble, Spitzer and Herschel Space Telescopes.
The Keck Observatory data was gathered by the powerful MOSFIRE infrared spectrograph and was crucial to determining SpARCS1049+56’s distance from Earth as 9.8 billion light-years, that it contains at least 27 galaxies and that it has a total mass equal to about 400 trillion Suns.
The cluster was first identified from the University of California, Riverside-led, Spitzer Adaptation of the Red-sequence Cluster Survey, or SpARCS, which has discovered about 200 new distant galaxy clusters using deep ground-based optical observations combined with Spitzer Space Telescope infrared observations.
Because Spitzer and Herschel Space Telescopes detect infrared light – enabling observers to see hidden, dusty regions of star formation – they were able to reveal the full extent of the massive amount of star formation going on in SpARCS1049+56. However, the resolution of the infrared observations was insufficient to pinpoint where all this star formation was coming from. Therefore, high-resolution follow-up optical observations were performed by the Hubble Space Telescope to reveal “beads on a string” at the center of SpARCS1049+56 which occur when, similar to a necklace, clumps of new star formation appear strung out like beads on filaments of hydrogen gas.
“Beads on a string” is a telltale sign of something known as a wet merger, which occurs when at least one galaxy in a collision between galaxies is gas rich, and this gas is converted quickly into new stars. The large amount of star formation and the “beads on a string” feature in the core of SpARCS1049+56 are likely the result of the Brightest Cluster Galaxy in the process of gobbling up a gas-rich spiral galaxy.
A team of astronomers discovered a Jupiter-like planet within a young system that could serve as a decoder ring for understanding how planets formed around our sun. The W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii confirmed the discovery. The findings were headed by Bruce Macintosh, a professor of physics at Stanford University, and show the new planet, 51 Eridani b, is one million times fainter than its parent star and shows the strongest methane signature ever detected on an alien planet, which should yield additional clues as to how the planet formed. The results are published in the current issue of Science.
Image of 51 Eri b as seen by the NIRC2 instrument on Keck Observatory’s Keck II telescope. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory, Christian Marois, NRC Canada“This is the first exoplanet discovered with the Gemini Planet Imager, one of the new generation instruments designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright stars,” said Franck Marchis, Senior Planetary Astronomer at the SETI Institute and member of the team that built the instrument and now conducts the survey.
While NASA’s Kepler space observatory has discovered thousands of planets, it does so indirectly by detecting a loss of starlight as a planet passes in front of its star, the Gemini Planet Imager was designed specifically for discovering and analyzing faint, young planets orbiting bright stars.
“To detect planets, Kepler sees their shadow,” said Macintosh, who is also a member of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. “The Gemini Planet Imager instead sees their glow, which we refer to as direct imaging.”
Akin to trying to detect a firefly in front of a lighthouse, the team analyzed the light from the star, then blocked it out. The remaining incoming light was analyzed, with the brightest spots indicating a possible planet.
A team of astrophysicists using the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has successfully measured the farthest galaxy ever recorded and more interestingly, captured its hydrogen emission as seen when the Universe was less than 600 million years old. Additionally, the method in which the galaxy called EGSY8p7 was detected gives important insight into how the very first stars in the Universe lit-up after the Big Bang. The paper will be published shortly in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
EGSY8p7 is the most distant confirmed galaxy whose spectrum obtained with the W. M. Keck Observatory places it at a redshift of 8.68 at a time when the Universe was less than 600 million years old. Credit: Adi Zitrin, California Institute of TechnologyUsing Keck Observatory’s powerful infrared spectrograph called MOSFIRE, the team dated the galaxy by detecting its Lyman-alpha emission line – a signature of hot hydrogen gas heated by strong ultraviolet emission from newly born stars. Although this is a frequently detected signature in galaxies close to Earth, the detection of Lyman-alpha emission at such a great distance is unexpected as it is easily absorbed by the numerous hydrogen atoms thought to pervade the space between galaxies at the dawn of the Universe. The result gives new insight into cosmic reionization’, the process by which dark clouds of hydrogen were split into their constituent protons and electrons by the first generation of galaxies.
“We frequently see the Lyman-alpha emission line of hydrogen in nearby objects as it is one of most reliable tracers of star-formation,” said California Institute of Technology (Caltech) astronomer, Adi Zitrin, lead author of the discovery paper. “However, as we penetrate deeper into the Universe, and hence back to earlier times, the space between galaxies contains an increasing number of dark clouds of hydrogen which absorb this signal.”
Recent work has found the fraction of galaxies showing this prominent line declines markedly after when the Universe was about a billion years old, which is equivalent to a redshift of about 6. Redshift is a measure of how much the Universe has expanded since the light left a distant source and can only be determined for faint objects with a spectrograph on a powerful large telescope such as the Keck Observatory’s twin 10-meter telescopes, the largest on Earth.
UCLA professor and longtime W. M. Keck Observatory astronomer, Andrea Ghez will be awarded the 2015 Bakerian Medal, the Royal Society’s premiere prize lecture in the physical sciences, the organization announced this week.
Andrea Ghez, Keck Observatory astronomer and UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics. Credit: Christopher Dibble“I’m thrilled to receive the Bakerian Medal from the Royal Society,” said Ghez, who is UCLA’s Lauren B. Leichtman and Arthur E. Levine Professor of Astrophysics. “The research that is being recognized is the product of a wonderful collaboration among the scientists in the UCLA Galactic Center Group and the University of California’s tremendous investment in the W. M. Keck Observatory. Having cutting-edge tools and a great team makes discovery easy.”
The medal is accompanied by a cash prize of 10,000 pounds (approximately $15,500), and Ghez will deliver the Bakerian Lecture in London in November. The organization, the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence, cited Ghez’s “acclaimed discoveries using the techniques of optical astronomy, especially her sustained work on the motions and nature of the stars orbiting the black hole in the centre of our Galaxy.”
“All the data for this project came from Keck Observatory,” Ghez said. “We were able to launch this project 20 years ago because of the unique way that Keck Observatory works. We were able to modify instrumentation and try new approaches to data collection in a way that simply isn’t possible at other observatories. Working at Keck Observatory and with the staff there has been an amazing experience.”
The W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have made independent confirmations of an exoplanet orbiting far from its central star. The planet was discovered through a technique called gravitational microlensing. This finding opens a new piece of discovery space in the extrasolar planet hunt: to uncover planets as far from their central stars as Jupiter and Saturn are from our sun. The Hubble and Keck Observatory results will appear in two papers in the July 30 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.
A graphic explanation of the microlensing study of OGLE-2005-BLG-169. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STSCI)The large majority of exoplanets cataloged so far are very close to their host stars because several current planet-hunting techniques favor finding planets in short-period orbits. But this is not the case with the microlensing technique, which can find more distant and colder planets in long-period orbits that other methods cannot detect.
Microlensing occurs when a foreground star amplifies the light of a background star that momentarily aligns with it. If the foreground star has planets, then the planets may also amplify the light of the background star, but for a much shorter period of time than their host star. The exact timing and amount of light amplification can reveal clues to the nature of the foreground star and its accompanying planets.
“Microlensing is currently the only method to detect the planets close to their birth place,” said team member, Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris. “Indeed, planets are being mostly formed at a certain distance from the central star where it is cold enough for volatile compounds to condense into solid ice grains. These grains will then aggregate and will ultimately evolve into planets.”
The system, cataloged as OGLE-2005-BLG-169, was discovered in 2005 by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), the Microlensing Follow-Up Network (MicroFUN), and members of the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics (MOA) collaborations—groups that search for extrasolar planets through gravitational microlensing.
