When you want to see the stars, find someplace dark
The storm appears to be waning now, the satellite shows that much of it has passed the island. Not long ago the snowplow crews let it be known that they would not reach the summit today, try again tomorrow as the storm abates.
I did a bit of a photo survey of the summit using MastCam to check on the summit conditions. Poliʻahu rules Mauna Kea!
The storm continues unabated atop Mauna Kea. Word from the snowplow crews is bad, deep drifts cover the road above the switchbacks. They are stating that it is unlikely our summit crew will be able to access the telescopes today. That will make the second day in a row with no access.
MastCam is still functioning, only half the dome is covered with ice. I have turned the heater on in an attempt to clear what I can. The view it reveals is deeper snow and a lot more ice. The railings on the dome ladders have coatings many inches thick.
Folks sometimes get a little perturbed when MKSS closes the Mauna Kea summit road. Everyone wants to go up and see the snow. Yes, the road is closed right now, for good reason, there really is no accessible road on the summit at the moment. Not taking my word for it? See for yourself…
The storm is raging at the summit. The wind is howling and freezing fog is coating everything with ice. The webcam images are mostly blocked as ice covers the camera windows, but I can still see out of one side of MastCam towards the Keck 2 dome.
Just received word that our day crew will not attempt the summit, they are leaving HP and headed home. The rangers report snow drifts on the road at fairly low elevations and the snow plow crews will not attempt to clear the roads until the storm abates. Looks like we will lose cooling on some of the instruments as the liquid nitrogen runs out.
W. M. Keck Observatory press release…
Astronomers have for the first time spotted four images of a distant exploding star, arranged in a cross-shape pattern by a powerful gravitational lens. In addition to being a unique sighting, the discovery will provide insight into the distribution of dark matter. The findings will appear March 6 in a special issue of the journal Science, celebrating the centenary of Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.
To explain the unique, four-up projection, the scientists determined a galaxy cluster and one of its massive elliptical members are gravitationally bending and magnifying the light from the supernova behind it, through an effect called gravitational lensing. First predicted by Albert Einstein, this effect is similar to a glass lens bending light to magnify and distort the image of an object behind it. The multiple images, arranged around the massive elliptical galaxy, form an Einstein Cross, a name originally given to a multiple-lensed quasar that appear as a cross.
Although astronomers have discovered dozens of multiply imaged galaxies and quasars, they have never seen a stellar explosion resolved into several images. “It really threw me for a loop when I spotted the four images surrounding the galaxy – it was a complete surprise,” said Patrick Kelly of the University of California, Berkeley, lead author of the paper and a member of the Grism Lens Amplified Survey from Space (GLASS) collaboration. The GLASS group is working with the FrontierSN team to analyze the supernova.
Continue reading “Supernova Split into Four Images by Cosmic Lens”
W. M. Keck Observatory press release…
Scientists using the W. M. Keck Observatory and Pan-STARRS1 telescopes on Hawaii have discovered a star that breaks the galactic speed record, traveling with a velocity of about 1,200 kilometers per second or 2.7 million miles per hour. This velocity is so high, the star will escape the gravity of our galaxy. In contrast to the other known unbound stars, the team showed that this compact star was ejected from an extremely tight binary by a thermonuclear supernova explosion. These results will be published in the March 6 issue of Science.
A close encounter with the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is typically presumed the most plausible mechanism for kicking these stars out of the galaxy.
A team of astronomers led by Stephan Geier (European Southern Observatory, Garching) observed the known high-velocity star know as US 708 with the Echellette Spectrograph and Imager instrument on the 10-meter, Keck II telescope to measure its distance and velocity along our line of sight. By carefully combining position measurements from digital archives with newer positions measured from images taken during the course of the Pan-STARRS1 survey, they were able to derive the tangential component of the star’s velocity (across our line of sight).
Putting the measurements together, the team determined the star is moving at about 1,200 kilometers per second – much higher than the velocities of previously known stars in the Milky Way galaxy. More importantly, the trajectory of US 708 means the supermassive black hole at the galactic center could not be the source of US 708’s extreme velocity.
W. M. Keck Observatory press release…
A primitive ocean on Mars once held more water than Earth’s Arctic Ocean, according to NASA scientists who measured signatures of water in the planet’s atmosphere using the most powerful telescopes on Earth including the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The results are being published in the journal Science on March 6, 2015.
“Our study provides a solid estimate of how much water Mars once had, by determining how much water was lost to space,” said Geronimo Villanueva, first author of the paper and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “With this work, we can better understand the history of water on Mars.”
The new estimate is based on detailed observations of two slightly different forms of water in Mars’ atmosphere. One is the familiar H2O, made with two hydrogens and one oxygen. The other is HDO, a naturally occurring variation in which one hydrogen is replaced by a heavier form, called deuterium.
It snowed much of yesterday and well into the night. The result? Probably about a foot total at the summit, the Mauna Kea rangers report drifts of up to two feet in places. I am scheduled up top tomorrow, maybe some more photos?
It is snowing pretty hard on the summit of Mauna Kea right now. There were a few inches from the previous days, looks like quite a bit more by tomorrow…
You are invited to a public lecture…
Astronomy Talk: America’s Space Program – NASA’s Roadmap to Tomorrow’s Missions
The agency currently has spacecraft speeding toward Jupiter and Pluto and roving on Mars, and is searching for planets that could potentially harbor life beyond our solar system. An unprecedented mission to capture and redirect an asteroid to an orbit near to Earth is in the planning stages, and the Space Launch System and Orion Crew vehicle are reaching new milestones in development to take astronauts to an asteroid and on to Mars.
NASA has been a 1/6 partner in the W. M. Keck Observatory since 1996 and it is an honor to offer this program to the community.
Friday March 13, 2015
07:00 pm – 08:00 pm
Kahilu Theatre
Waimea
Free Admission