Tag: Keck

NASA Honors Keck Observatory for Opening its Archive to the Public

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

Keck 2 Lasing
The Keck 2 AO laser works the northern sky
The 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.

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Hawaii Discovers: The World’s Leading Observatory Was Born in Hawaii 25 Years Ago

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

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.

Kohala 5th Grade at Keck
The fifth grade class from Kohala Elementary reconstructed the Keck Observatory mirrors during the 25th anniversary of “First Light”, credit Andrew Hara / Ena Media Hawaii
And 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.

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Keck Celebrates 25 years Since First Light

W. M. Keck Observatory press release by Sean Adkins…

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.

Keck 1 with Nine Segments
On November 24, 2015, Keck Observatory first observed the heavens above Maunakea, shooting Hawaii into the forefront of scientific research. Credit: W. M. Keck Observatory
This 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.

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Prodigious ‘Brightest Cluster Galaxy’ Discovered Churning Trillions of Stars

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
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.

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Keck Staff

Almost the entire Keck Observatory staff forming the hexagonal outline of one of the primary mirrors. Seeing the size of one of the mirrors like this really puts things in scale.

Our director, Dr. Hilton Lewis, is center front. Do not look for me… I am standing on the ladder taking the photo.

Keck Staff
Nearly the entire Keck staff forming the outline of one of the primary telescope mirrors

The Keck Observatory Archive

The data produced by the W. M. Keck Observatory is available for anyone to view. This may come as a surprise to some who assume that astronomers hoard their precious data and jealously deny any access. I have also seen claims by anti-TMT activists who claim that telescope data is secret and access is restricted to some authorized group. It is a common theme I have seen repeated quite a few times during the Astronomy on Mauna Kea debate.

Saturn NIRC2 dePater
An image of Saturn taken in infrared light by NIRC2, image credit KOA/dePater

“There is an appointment signup of experts of bureaucrat choosing and the findings disappear amongst the grant supported or institutions we have no knowledge about” – Claire Templeton in a Facebook comment 16Aug2015

The idea is at least understandable. Much of modern astronomy is fairly arcane to the layman, not easily understood and seemingly mysterious. It does not have to be that way, the images and data are fully public. A small community, including astronomers and amateur astronomers, has learned to use the data to do science, or to simply peruse for their own edification. All it takes is an evening of educating yourself and you have access to a huge array of data.

The astronomers do guard their data and deny others access, but they are only allowed to do this for a limited period of time. This gives the astronomer exclusive use of their data long enough to complete the research and publish the paper. The amount of time they have exclusive use varies by telescope and institution, but it is usually a year or two. For the W. M Keck Observatory the data is usually embargoed for 18 months. Once the exclusive period expires the data is available to anyone and is posted in the online public archive.

Keck’s archive is known as KOA, or Keck Online Archive. Also a nice reference to the beautiful Koa forests that are common on the windward slopes of Mauna Kea. Here you can search and peruse twenty years of Keck data.

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Hot Jupiter-esque Discovery Hints at Planet Formation

W. M. Keck Observatory press release…

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.

51Eri b
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.

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Hawaiian Heavens

You might recall a post from back in May describing a night spent on the summit with Jason Chu. He has been accumulating time lapse material for a significant project, capturing the telescopes of Mauna Kea under the beauty of the night sky.

Jason has published a preview of the work. Nice to see it come to life with a decent soundtrack and good editing…