#Observatory in hawaii

[prodtonki]

Observatory in hawaii

In early 2021 the Hawaii House of Representatives passed a resolution that created the Mauna Kea Working Group and challenged it with drafting alternatives to Maunakea’s existing management, which had been helmed by the University of Hawaii. “Hawaii-Style” Conflict Resolutionīut the conflict’s embers were still smoldering. They dismantled the encampment and rode out the pandemic beneath the mountain’s cloud-covered slopes. The kiaʻi left, secure in the knowledge that, at least for the time being, the summit was safe from further development. By March 2020 the coronavirus pandemic had reached Hawaii, sweeping through local communities. In December 2019, amid the turmoil along the access road, the TMT board of governors voted to pause construction. The local people who don’t really understand,” she told reporters during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu in 2020. “Oftentimes, we feel that we are instead looked upon as the bad guys. And it didn’t seem to Wong-Wilson as though anyone outside the Native Hawaiian community cared too much about honoring and taking care of such a sacred place. It’s the place where Earth Mother and Father Sky met, a home of the gods, the fount of existence. In Hawaiian cosmology, Maunakea isn’t just a sacred pinnacle-it’s the center of the entire universe. “To me, the powers that be have been very anxious about increasing the opportunities for astronomical observation and research and very reticent about doing anything about the facilities whose time has passed,” Wong-Wilson says.įor her and the Maunakea kiaʻi, the mountain’s self-appointed guardians or protectors, the 18-story, $2.4-billion TMT was one injury too many to their revered land. In 2019 resumed construction of one more telescope-the mammoth Thirty-Meter Telescope, or TMT-ignited a storm of protests that culminated in roadblocks, arrests and the establishment of a large, rain-lashed encampment near the summit access road. Some 13 telescopes are already etched onto Maunakea’s silhouette, providing astronomers with the means to study distant- sometimes hidden-planets, to make images of supermassive black holes and to study interstellar asteroids. At nearly 14,000 feet above sea level, the clear, still air over the peak contains roughly half as much observation-muddling water vapor as is found at lower altitudes, making the mountaintop arguably the premier ground-based observing site in the Northern Hemisphere. “It makes the situation less about an ‘us-versus-them’ narrative of astronomy and more about astronomy as part of mutual stewardship of Maunakea.” Protectors versus Powers That Beįor years now, astronomers have been at odds with Native Hawaiians and others for whom Maunakea’s cinder-coned summit is more than just an ideal place for stargazing. “This is a really important opportunity to reset the dialogue around making things centered on the mauna, as opposed to centered around any one interest on the mauna,” says John O’Meara, chief scientist of the W. But some astronomers are now more optimistic and say the new legislation defines the right way forward. “We have come from literally being arrested in July on the mauna, on the mountain, to now, where House Bill 2024 provides seats at the decision-making table specifically for Native Hawaiians-and that, to me, is a huge shift,” says Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, a Native Hawaiian activist and educator and a leader of a movement that aims to protect Maunakea.Īnd it’s a shift that, at least when it was first proposed, alarmed those fighting for a future for astronomy on the mauna’s summit. On July 7 Governor David Ige signed into law HB2024-a bill mandating that control over the mountain’s summit be transferred from the University of Hawaii, which has held the master lease to those lands since 1968, to an 11-member “Mauna Kea stewardship and oversight authority.” It’s a shift many hope will pave a path through an anguished, long-simmering impasse that in the past few years has intensified and polarized astronomers and Native Hawaiians as never before. One of the most coveted and contested astronomical sites on the planet-the summit of Hawaii’s massive mountain Maunakea-will soon be governed by a new group of stewards comprising Native Hawaiians, cultural practitioners, and representatives of the state and other institutions.

[krakenmare]

Gemini Observatory: Saturn & Titan (May 7, 2009)

[planetaryalphabet]

OMUAMUA

“ʻOumuamua is the first interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System. Formally designated 1I/2017 U1, it was discovered by Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Haleakalā Observatory, Hawaii, on 19 October 2017, approximately 40 days after it passed its closest point to the Sun on 9 September. When it was first observed, it was about 33 million km (21 million mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon) and already heading away from the Sun.”

“Its light curve, assuming little systematic error, presents its motion as "tumbling" rather than "spinning", and moving sufficiently fast relative to the Sun that it is likely of an extrasolar origin.”

(Quotes from Wikipedia.)

This immediately made me think of “Rendezvous with Rama” (1973) by Arthur C. Clarke.

[belladonna-tristesse]

[underzemilkyway]

Inside The Controversy Over Building 1 of The World’s Largest Telescopes | Beyond the Mauna | Seeker

The summit of Mauna Kea is perfect for astronomy but it's also regarded as one of the most sacred lands for Native Hawaiians. We get a look inside the two sides that have been debating about the construction of one of the largest ground telescopes in the world. » Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com Thumbnail Credit: Courtesy TMT International Observatory On the island of Hawaii sits a dormant volcano named Mauna Kea. It’s the highest point in Hawaii, and if you measure from the sea floor, it’s the tallest mountain in the world. And this height, paired with a few other important elements, has made it home to numerous observatories. But, this mountain isn’t just a perfect place to peer deep into the vastness of our universe. It’s also a very sacred place for the local native Hawaiian people, who have been protesting the construction of a newly planned telescope since the site was selected for construction in 2009. This film, from co-directors Carter Lau and Duncan Heger as well as their team from Chapman University, looks to shed light on an important debate that may have been tragically overlooked so many times in the past; science vs culture. This is Beyond the Mauna. #documentary#seekerindie#seeker#nature#conservation ____________________ Seeker empowers the curious to understand the science shaping our world. We tell award-winning stories about the natural forces and groundbreaking innovations that impact our lives, our planet, and our universe. Visit the Seeker Indie website! https://www.seeker.com/indie Subscribe now! http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c... Seeker on Twitter http://twitter.com/seeker Seeker on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/SeekerMedia/ Seeker http://www.seeker.com/

[mserratog]

Maunakea Observatories - Hawai'i

Maunakea Observatories – Hawai’i

During our visit to the Big Island in Hawai’i, we went to the Mauna Kea Observatories. This is one of the most impressive hikes we have ever made. The Maunakea Observatories are a collaboration of nonprofit independent institutions with telescopes located on Maunakea on the island of Hawai‘i and managed by organizations and countries such as NASA, the University of Hawai’i, Canada, France, the…

[industrybuzz]

Mauna Loa Erupts For the First Time In Decades

The world's largest active volcano is erupting.

Mauna Loa erupts, after several years of warning activity, and sends lava rolling slowly down its slope. Despite being known as the world’s largest active volcano, Mauna Loa, the central peak of Hawaii’s Big Island is currently erupting for the first time in nearly 40 years. Late Sunday night, three fissures opened on the northeast flank of the volcano, spitting lava fountains almost 140 feet…

[theofficialastronomy101]

Infrared Uranus, its rings and Moons captured by the monster * 10 meter W. M. Keck Observatory

Telescope in Hawaii

[mindblowingscience]

Roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth, there is a cosmic structure known as IRAS 23077+6707 (IRAS 23077) that resembles a giant butterfly. Ciprian T. Berghea, an astronomer with the US Naval Observatory, originally observed the structure in 2016 using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). To the surprise of many, the structure has remained unchanged for years, leading some to question what IRAS 2307 could be. Recently, two international teams of astronomers made follow-up observations using the Submillimeter Array at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Hawaii to better understand IRAS 2307.

Continue Reading.

[deseos-de-la-via-lactea]

An infrared shot of Uranus and its rings, taken by astronomer Mike Brown using the adaptive optics system at Hawaii's Keck Observatory.

[sepdet]

[Nov 28, 2022] With that mixture of OH SHIT and OH WOW that one so often feels about mother nature at her most powerful, I see that Mauna Loa, the largest volcano on Earth, has started erupting.

Screengrab from summit webcam just now, dawn in Hawai‘i:

(Not sure how wide this field of view is, but Mauna Loa is unimaginably vast, about 75 miles /120 km across and much taller than Everest if you remove the Pacific Ocean.)

Thermal cam from last night showing the lava pouring across the summit caldera floor:

Latest update from Hawaii Volcano Observatory says lava hasn't yet left summit caldera. Let's hope it doesn't. Hawaiians know better than I which emergency services to listen to for updates. Praying for y'all that Pele puts on a show without choosing to come makai.

See HVO's Mauna Loa Updates for latest observations as well as emergency maps, information, FAQs, links, and more.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA telescopes work out black hole's feeding schedule

By using new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory as well as ESA's XMM-Newton, a team of researchers has made important headway in understanding how—and when—a supermassive black hole obtains and then consumes material.

A paper describing these results appears on the arXiv preprint server, and will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. The authors are Dheeraj Passam (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Eric Coughlin (Syracuse University), Muryel Guolo (Johns Hopkins University), Thomas Wevers (Space Telescope Science Institute), Chris Nixon (University of Leeds, UK), Jason Hinkle (University of Hawaii at Manoa), and Ananaya Bandopadhyay (Syracuse).

This artist's impression above shows a star that has partially been disrupted by such a black hole in the system known as AT2018fyk. The supermassive black hole in AT2018fyk—with about 50 million times more mass than the sun—is in the center of a galaxy located about 860 million light-years from Earth.

Astronomers have determined that a star is on a highly elliptical orbit around the black hole in AT2018fyk so that its point of farthest approach from the black hole is much larger than its closest. During its closest approach, tidal forces from the black hole pull some material from the star, producing two tidal tails of "stellar debris."

The illustration shows a point in the orbit soon after the star is partially destroyed, when the tidal tails are still in close proximity to the star. Later in the star's orbit, the disrupted material returns to the black hole and loses energy, leading to a large increase in X-ray brightness occurring later in the orbit (not shown here).

This process repeats each time the star returns to its point of closest approach, which is approximately every 3.5 years. The illustration depicts the star during its second orbit, and the disk of X-ray emitting gas around the black hole that is produced as a byproduct of the first tidal encounter.

Researchers took note of AT2018fyk in 2018 when the optical ground-based survey ASAS-SN detected that the system had become much brighter. After observing it with NASA's NICER and Chandra, and XMM-Newton, researchers determined that the surge in brightness came from a "tidal disruption event," or TDE, which signals that a star was completely torn apart and partially ingested after flying too close to a black hole. Chandra data of AT2018fyk is shown in the inset of an optical image of a wider field-of-view.

When material from the destroyed star approached close to the black hole, it became hotter and produced X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) light. These signals then faded, agreeing with the idea that nothing was left of the star for the black hole to digest.

However, about two years later, the X-ray and UV light from the galaxy became much brighter again. According to astronomers, this meant that the star likely survived the initial gravitational grab by the black hole and then entered a highly elliptical orbit with the black hole. During its second close approach to the black hole, more material was pulled off and produced more X-ray and UV light.

These results were published in a 2023 paper in the Astrophysical Journal Letters led by Thomas Wevers from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

"Initially we thought this was a garden-variety case of a black hole totally ripping a star apart," said Wevers. "But instead, the star appears to be living to die another day."

Based on what they had learned about the star and its orbit, Wevers and his team predicted that the black hole's second meal would end in August 2023, and applied for Chandra observing time to check.

"The telltale sign of this stellar snack ending would be a sudden drop in the X-rays and that's exactly what we see in our Chandra observations on Aug. 14, 2023," said Dheeraj Pasham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the leader of the new paper on these results. "Our data show that in August last year, the black hole was essentially wiping its mouth and pushing back from the table."

The new data obtained by Chandra and Swift after the 2023 paper was completed gives the researchers an even better estimate of how long it takes the star to complete an orbit, and future mealtimes for the black hole. They determine that the star makes its closest approach to the black hole about once every three and a half years.

"We think that a third meal by the black hole, if anything is left of the star, will begin between May and August of 2025 and last for almost two years," said Eric Coughlin, a co-author of the new paper, from Syracuse University in New York. "This will probably be more of a snack than a full meal because the second meal was smaller than the first, and the star is being whittled away."

The authors think that the doomed star originally had another star as a companion as it approached the black hole. When the stellar pair got too close to the black hole, however, the gravity from the black hole pulled the two stars apart. One entered orbit with the black hole, and the other was tossed into space at high speed.

"The doomed star was forced to make a drastic change in companions—from another star to a giant black hole," said co-author Muryel Guolo of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. "Its stellar partner escaped, but it did not."

The team plans to keep following AT2018fyk for as long as they can to study the behavior of such an exotic system.

[blasteffect]

2023-GX1 !

Telescopes across the globe, once trained on distant nebulae and shimmering galaxies, now pointed towards a single, menacing point in the sky. A celestial body, a cosmic bullet of rock and ice, was hurtling towards Earth. It wasn't a small, insignificant pebble, but a behemoth larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, a monument to destruction barreling down on our planet.

The initial discovery was made by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS), a Hawaii-based observatory dedicated to scanning the heavens for near-Earth objects. The date: August 12, 2023. The designation: 2023-GX1.

[scotianostra]

On June 13th 1831 James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh.

It’s difficult to understand why this guy is still hardly known by ordinary Scots, but is one of the most influential scientists of all time. Albert Einstein acknowledged that the origins of the special theory of relativity lay in Clerk Maxwell’s theories, saying “The work of James Clerk Maxwell changed the world forever”.

Now I don’t pretend to know about science, the calculations involve make my head hurt, but I do know that James deserves his place at the top table of scientists past and present, and probably the future too. The praise heaped on him from many of the most eminent scholars is phenomenal.

Nicknamed “daftie” by his fellow pupils at Edinburgh Academy, earned by wearing home-made shoes on his first day, he went on to predict the existence of radio waves in 1865, and is considered by many to be the father of the science of electronics, he also found time to teach, and if you recall he taught yesterdays birthday boy astronomer, David Gill.

Born in Edinburgh in 1831 he attended school in the city and later studied at the Universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge. He was a very curious child, and this might amaze you, but he wrote his first scientific paper at the age of just 14, at the age of 25 he became Professor of Physics at Aberdeen University’s Marischal College.

Clerk Maxwell’s research into electromagnetic radiation brought about many of the things we know today like television, mobile phones, radios and infra-red telescopes. The largest astronomical telescope in the world, at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, is named in his honour, this is an indication of his standing to this day as a scientist.

In 1873 he created the four Maxwell equations. They are very complicated and you would have to be a scientist to figure them out. But these four theories played a very important role in Albert Einstein’s work on the special theory of relativity. Einstein praised him and said, “The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell Equations of the electromagnetic field.” Clerk Maxwell’s discovery of the nature of electromagnetic waves forms the basis for much of the modern technological society we take for granted. Radio, television, satellite communications and the mobile phone have their origins in his work.

In 1879, James Clerk Maxwell’s health began to fail. Following a summer visit to the family estate in Kirkcudbrightshire, he returned to Cambridge where he died on 5th November that year.

[rjzimmerman]

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory just captured ominous signals about the planet’s health. (Washington Post)

Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory just captured an ominous sign about the pace of global warming.

Atmospheric levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide aren’t just on their way to yet another record high this year — they’re rising faster than ever, according to the latest in a 66-year-long series of observations.

Carbon dioxide levels were 4.7 parts per million higher in March than they were a year earlier, the largest annual leap ever measured at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration laboratory atop a volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island. And from January through April, CO2 concentrations increased faster than they have in the first four months of any other year. Data from Mauna Loa is used to create the Keeling Curve, a chart that daily plots global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, tracked by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

For decades, CO2 concentrations at Mauna Loa in the month of May have broken previous records. But the recent acceleration in atmospheric CO2, surpassing a record-setting increase observed in 2016, is perhaps a more ominous signal of failing efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and the damage they cause to Earth’s climate.

“Not only is CO2 still rising in the atmosphere — it’s increasing faster and faster,” said Arlyn Andrews, a climate scientist at NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

A historically strong El Niño climate pattern that developed last year is a big reason for the spike. But the weather pattern only punctuated an existing trend in which global carbon emissions are rising even as U.S. emissions have declined and the growth in global emissions has slowed.

Each annual maximum has raised new alarm about the curve’s unceasing upward trend — nearing 427 parts per million in the most recent readings, which is more than 50 percent above preindustrial levels and the highest in at least 4.3 million years, according to NOAA. Atmospheric CO2 levels first surpassed 400 parts per million in 2014. Scientists said in 2016 that levels were unlikely to drop below that threshold again during the lifetime of even the youngest generations.

Since that year, carbon dioxide emissions tied to fossil fuel consumption have increased 5 percent globally, according to Scripps.