May 3, 2018: University of Hawaii Astronomer John Tonry Elected to National Academy of Sciences

University of Hawaii at Mnoa astronomer John Tonry has been named as one of the National Academy of Sciences' 84 newly chosen members. Tonry, who has been with the UH Mnoa Institute for Astronomy since 1996, joins an elite group of fewer than 2,400 exceptional scientists worldwide. NAS members are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

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Today, NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), its newest telescope to search for planets beyond our Solar System, and astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy and Maunakea telescopes will be a part of the adventure.

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Paul Coleman, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, passed away at his home on January 16th, 2018. Paul was the first Native Hawaiian with a doctorate in astrophysics. In his 15 years with the IfA, Paul played a key role in our education and public outreach efforts, and advocated tirelessly for astronomy in Hawaii.

Obituary

The University of Hawaii ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope on Mauna Loa captured images on February 8, 2018 of the Tesla Roadster launched into space as part of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy test.

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Extremely distant galaxies are usually too faint to be seen, even by the largest telescopes. But nature has a solution - gravitational lensing, predicted by Albert Einstein and observed many times by astronomers. Now, an international team of astronomers led by Harald Ebeling from the University of Hawaii has discovered one of the most extreme instances of magnification by gravitational lensing.

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University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA) Director Gnther Hasinger will be leaving UH to be the next Director of Science at the European Space Agency (ESA), Europe's equivalent to NASA.

UH will name an interim Director for the IfA and begin a search for a new Director.

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A team of astronomers from Maryland, Hawaii, Israel, and France has produced the most detailed map ever of the orbits of galaxies in our extended local neighborhood, showing the past motions of almost 1400 galaxies within 100 million light years of the Milky Way.

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Since astronomers first measured the size of an extrasolar planet seventeen years ago, they have struggled to answer the question: how did the largest planets get to be so large? Thanks to the recent discovery of twin planets by a University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy team led by graduate student Samuel Grunblatt, we are getting closer to an answer.

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In October, astronomers at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA) made a stunning discovery with the Pan-STARRS1 telescope - the first interstellar object seen passing through our Solar System. Now, an international team lead by Karen Meech (ifA) has made detailed measurements of the visitor's properties. "This thing is very strange," said Karen Meech.

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A small, recently discovered asteroid - or perhaps a comet - appears to have originated from outside the solar system, coming from somewhere else in our galaxy. If so, it would be the first "interstellar object" to be observed and confirmed by astronomers. This unusual object - for now designated A/2017 U1 - was discovered Oct. 19 by the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala during the course of its nightly search for Near-Earth Objects for NASA.

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UH astronomers and their international collaborators announced the discovery and study of the first binary neutron star merger detected in gravitational waves in articles published today in Science, Nature, and the Astrophysical Journal. The study of this event shows that at least some of the elements heavier than iron were originally created in binary neutron star mergers like this one.

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The brightest members of the Pleiades cluster form a spectacular group of naked-eye stars that have played a central role in cultures around the world for millennia. Now, an international team of astronomers, including Daniel Huber from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, used the Kepler Space Telescope to perform the most detailed study to date of their variability - with some interesting new discoveries.

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The cosmic web - the distribution of matter on the largest scales in the universe - has usually been defined through the distribution of galaxies. Now, a new study by a team of astronomers from France, Israel, and Hawaii demonstrates a novel approach. Instead of using galaxy positions, they mapped the motions of thousands of galaxies. Because galaxies are pulled toward gravitational attractors and move away from empty regions, these motions allowed the team to locate the denser matter in clusters and filaments and the absence of matter in regions called voids.

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The University of Hawaii's 2.2 meter (88-inch) telescope on Maunakea will soon be producing images nearly as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope, thanks to a new instrument using the latest image sharpening technologies. Astronomer Christoph Baranec, at the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy (IfA), has been awarded a nearly $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to build an autonomous adaptive optics system called Robo-AO-2 for the UH telescope.

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The UH Institute for Astronomy celebrates its 50th Anniversary with a special three-day meeting in Honolulu from June 28-30, 2017. Everyone with a history or relationship with the IfA is invited to attend, including former and present graduate students, postdocs, staff and faculty. See below for two free public events that are also part of the celebration.

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June 27th, 7:30PM, UH Manoa Orvis Auditorium: Perpetual Motion: Galileo and His RevolutionsSarah Pillow, soprano & Mary-Anne Ballard, viola da gamba, with guests Daniel Swenberg, lute and theorbo; author Dava Sobel & Marc Wagnon, video artistA moving and compelling account of a remarkable moment in the history of science, human thought and music, Perpetual Motion ties together the groundbreaking repertoire of Galileo's day, narration by acclaimed best-selling science writer Dava Sobel, and images of Earth and the cosmos. The UH Bookstore will have copies of Dava's books for sale, and she will be signing them!

Free Tickets (required) via Ticketbud

June 28th, 7:30PM, UH Manoa Orvis Auditorium: Dava Sobel talks on "The Glass Universe"The acclaimed author of Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (Walker, 1995), Dava Sobel will be speaking about her new book, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars (Viking, 2016), which tells the story of the women who worked at the Harvard College Observatory from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. The UH Bookstore will have copies of Dava's books for sale, and she will be signing them!

Free Tickets (required) via Ticketbud

Since the mid-1990s, when the first planet around another sun-like star was discovered, astronomers have been amassing what is now a large collection of exoplanets - nearly 3,500 have been confirmed so far. In a new study, whose lead author is an IfA graduate student, researchers have classified these planets in much the same way that biologists identify new animal species and have learned that the majority of exoplanets found to date fall into two distinct size groups: rocky Earth-like planets and larger mini-Neptunes. The team used data from NASA's Kepler mission and the W. M. Keck Observatory.

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An international team of astronomers, including IfA graduate student Jason Chu and Astronomer David Sanders, has used the Herschel Space Observatory to take far-infrared images of the 200 most infrared-luminous galaxies in the Local Universe.

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A team of astronomers, lead by IfA graduate Trent Dupuy and IfA astronomy Michael Liu, have shown what separates real stars from the wannabes. Not in Hollywood, but out in the universe. They found that an object must weigh at least 70 Jupiters in order to start hydrogen fusion. If it weighs less, the star does not ignite and becomes a brown dwarf instead.

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Starting the week of May 1, the University of Hawaii 88-inch telescope (UH88) will undergo much needed repair and maintenance. The renovation will include fresh paint and repaired siding on the exterior, roof repair and weather sealing of the dome, improved lightning protection, as well as safety upgrades.

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A good showing today for the IfA at the UH Awards Ceremony. Faculty members Christoph Baranec and Jeff Kuhn received the Board of Regents' Medal for Excellence in Research awards for excellence in research, while graduate student Will Best received the award for Student Excellence in Research (Doctoral Level).

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Join us at our Manoa Headquarters on April 23rd, from 11am-4pm, for a day of family-friendly activities and talks!

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The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), currently under construction on Haleakala, Maui, is expected to start observing the Sun in 2020. When it does, it will rely on two complex infrared instruments being built by the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA). Their goal is to measure the Sun's weak magnetic field.The first of these to be completed is called the Cryogenic Near-Infrared Spectropolarimeter (CryoNIRSP). In a major milestone, it took its first look at the Sun from the laboratories at the IfA's Advanced Technology Research Center on Maui.

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The IfA mourns the loss of our long-time faculty member and professor emeritus Toby Owen. Tobias (Toby) C. Owen, passed away on March 4, 2017, in Sacramento, California, where he had been living after retiring from the IfA in 2012.

Obituary, by Alan Tokunaga

In a groundbreaking study published in Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers, including Brent Tully from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, reports the discovery of a previously unknown, nearly empty region in our extragalactic neighborhood. Largely devoid of galaxies, this void exerts a repelling force, pushing our Local Group of galaxies through space.

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IfA Astronomer Nick Kaiser has been awarded the Gold Medal in Astronomy by the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). The Medal's past recipients include Albert Einstein, Edwin Hubble, Arthur Eddington and Stephen Hawking. Dr. Kaiser is receiving the award for his extensive theoretical and observational work on cosmology, including how matter - both dark and visible - is distributed on the largest scales.

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The Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy is publicly releasing the world's largest digital sky survey today, via the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

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At first glance, Ceres, the largest body in the main asteroid belt, may not look icy. Images from NASA's Dawn spacecraft have revealed a dark, heavily cratered world whose brightest area is made of highly reflective salts -- not ice. But newly published studies from Dawn scientists, including University of Hawaii astronomer Norbert Schrghofer, show two distinct lines of evidence for ice at or near the surface of the dwarf planet. These findings, which verify predictions made by scientists formerly at UH, are being presented at the 2016 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, California.

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Astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), Brazil, and Stanford University may have solved a long-standing solar mystery.Two decades ago, scientists discovered that the outer five percent of the Sun spins more slowly than the rest of its interior. Now, in a new study to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, IfA Maui scientists Ian Cunnyngham, Jeff Kuhn, and Isabelle Scholl, together with Marcelo Emilio (Brazil) and Rock Bush (Stanford), describe the physical mechanism responsible for slowing the Sun's outer layers.

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"A Magnificent Celestial Show in 2017: The August 21 Total Solar Eclipse in North America " with IfA astronomer Shadia Habbal, 7:30 p.m., UH Mnoa Art Building Auditorium (room 132). Free Admission (Campus Parking $6). Poster

One of nature's most spectacular celestial sights is the magnificent solar corona, visible only during a total solar eclipse. On August 21, 2017, the moon's shadow will sweep across the entire United States from Oregon to South Carolina over a span of approximately 90 minutes. Everyone in the 48 contiguous states and Alaska will witness at least a partial solar eclipse. Those directly under the moon's 60 mile-wide shadow will have 2 minutes of totality - one of life's most awesome experiences. Learn why people become eclipse chasers, traveling the world to enjoy their beauty - and do some science.

The annual IfA Maui Open House will be held Friday, Oct. 7, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Maikalani building in Pukalani, Maui. Free Admission. Flier

Comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami survived for 4.5 billion years in the frigid Kuiper Belt, a vast reservoir of icy bodies on the outskirts of our solar system. But within the last few million years, the unlucky comet was gravitationally kicked to the inner solar system by the outer planets - and this new home, closer to the sun, has doomed the comet. The Hubble Space Telescope caught the latest cloud of debris ejected by Comet 332P. The images, taken over three days in January 2016, represent one of the sharpest, most detailed observations of a comet breaking apart. The doomed comet may disintegrate in only 150 years.

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A team of astronomers known as the Kepler Habitable Zone Working Group, including University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy astronomer Nader Haghighipour, has identified which of the more than 4,000 exoplanets discovered by the NASA Kepler mission are most likely to be similar to our rocky home.

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Institute for Astronomy