Latest From the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) For the last 20 years the giant planets known as hot Jupiters have presented astronomers with a puzzle. How did they settle into orbits 100 times closer to their host stars than our own Jupiter is to the Sun? An international team of astronomers has announced this week1 the discovery of a newborn hot Jupiter, orbiting an infant sun — only 2 million years old, the stellar equivalent of a week-old human baby. The discovery that hot Jupiters can already be present at such an early stage of star-planet formation represents a major step forward in our understanding of how planetary systems form and evolve. Alternative artist view of V830 Tau and the newborn giant planet like the one recently discovered. Infant stars are very active making the detection of planets around them challenging. Image was created by student artist from Hawaii. (credit Michael Ho) For this discovery, the team monitored a 2 million-year-old infant star called V830 Tau, located in the Taurus stellar nursery, some 430 light-years away. Over the 1.5 months of the campaign, a regular 4.9-day “wobble” in the velocity of the host star revealed a giant planet almost as massive as Jupiter, orbiting its host star at a distance of only one-twentieth that of the Sun to the Earth distance. “Our discovery demonstrates for the first time that such bodies can be generated at very early stages of planetary formation, and likely play a central role in shaping the overall architecture of planetary systems” explains Jean-François Donati, CNRS astronomer at IRAP / OMP2 and lead author of...
By TOM CALLIS Hawaii Tribune-Herald University of Hawaii at Hilo’s Science and Technology Building was about as quiet as could be expected Wednesday given the summer break. That’s except for two rooms on the second floor where nearly 30 students were busy at work solving problems related to renewable energy and optics. And this was just the one-week preparatory course. The students from across Hawaii next will spend seven weeks at telescopes or technology businesses in the state working with mentors and gaining some valuable real-world experience. It’s all part of the Akamai Internship Program that for 14 years has acted as a launching pad for aspiring scientists and engineers in Hawaii. Akamai director Lisa Hunter estimates 81 percent of the 328 students who have come through the program have jobs in science and technology fields or are continuing their education. But despite its track record, Hunter said the program could face significant cutbacks. Since 2009, she said the program’s largest contributor has been the TMT International Observatory, the nonprofit organization behind the Thirty Meter Telescope, a controversial $1.4 billion project proposed for Mauna Kea. If the next-generation observatory, which has faced strong opposition from some Native Hawaiians who consider the mountain sacred, moves elsewhere, the program stands to be one of the most impacted. “When TMT started contributing money, that pretty much rescued us from having almost no interns on the Big Island,” Hunter said. “That was a big relief for us.” The $150,000 a year that TMT contributes makes up a third of the program’s funding. Additional funding sources include the Hawaii Community Foundation, Air Force Office...
The Akamai Workforce Initiative, a local program dedicated to advancing Hawai‘i college students into science and technology careers, has accepted 30 students into its 2016 summer internship program. With lead funding from the Thirty Meter Telescope, the Akamai Internship Program provides community college students and undergraduates with summer projects at observatories and other high tech companies in Hawai‘i. All 30 students are from Hawai‘i or are enrolled at a University of Hawai‘i campus, and nearly half are of native Hawaiian ancestry. The students receive credit from UH Hilo and begin on Monday, June 13, 2016, with a preparatory course taught by Akamai instructors. They will then complete a seven-week project at various observatories and facilities on Hawai‘i Island and Maui. The Akamai Workforce Initiative is designed to build tomorrow’s high-tech workforce by providing support to local college students over a broad range of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Each student is matched with a mentor and is integrated as a member of the mentor’s group with daily guidance. Akamai mentors are prepared to provide an experience that will support their intern’s persistence in STEM, while they complete a real project valued by their host organization, through a unique workshop offered in May. The careful attention to mentoring, the preparatory course, and an ongoing communication course, are all important elements of the program and have been attributed to the program’s success. This year’s interns and their placements include: Maveric Abella Hnu Photonics, Maui Dutch Akana University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, Hawai‘i Island Daryl Albano Canada-France-Hawai‘i Telescope, Hawai‘i Island Jaren Ashcraft Institute for Astronomy, Maui Gregory Balinbin Integrity Applications...
MAUNAKEA, Hawaii – Astronomers using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii have obtained the most precise measurement yet of how fast the universe is expanding at the present time, and it doesn’t agree with predictions based on other data and our current understanding of the physics of the cosmos. The discrepancy – the universe is now expanding 9 percent faster than expected — means either that measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation are wrong, or that some unknown physical phenomenon is speeding up the expansion of space, the astronomers say. The results, using data from Keck Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, will appear in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal. “If you really believe our number – and we have shed blood, sweat and tears to get our measurement right and to accurately understand the uncertainties – then it leads to the conclusion that there is a problem with predictions based on measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation, the leftover glow from the Big Bang,” said Alex Filippenko, a UC Berkeley professor of astronomy and co-author of a paper announcing the discovery. Using the Keck-I 10-meter telescope in Hawaii, Filippenko’s group measured the chemical abundances of gases near the locations of Cepheid variable stars in the nearby galaxies hosting Type Ia supernovae. This allowed them to improve the accuracy of the derived distances of these galaxies, and thus to more accurately calibrate the peak luminosities of their Type Ia supernovae. “We’ve done the world’s best job of decreasing the uncertainty in the measured rate of universal expansion and of accurately assessing the size of this uncertainty,” said Filippenko, “yet we...
On May 10, 2016 NASA held a press conference to announce officially the discovery of the a record number 1,284 confirmed extrasolar planets from Kepler’s primary mission. Among this record haul of exoplanets were also quite a few smaller worlds including some that were found to orbit inside the habitable zones (HZ) of their systems. The Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea played a vital role in sifting through the Kepler’s large list of possible planets to identify and confirm each one. You can read about all the science behind planet finding and the science behind identifying them here....
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