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We expected the attractive force of gravity to slow down the rate at which the universe is expanding. However, observations made at Keck Observatory of very distant exploding stars show that the expansion rate is actually speeding up.

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W. M. Keck Observatory is very pleased to announce John O’Meara’s appointment as Chief Scientist, effective December 3, 2018. “We are very pleased to welcome John as the Chief Scientist of Keck Observatory,” said W. M. Keck Observatory Director Hilton Lewis. “In this role, he will be responsible for the stewardship of the observatory’s scientific […]

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The Keck Observatory-Caltech NIRES team just completed the instrument’s first set of commissioning observations and achieved “first light” with a spectral image of the planetary nebula NGC 7027.

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Astronomers for the first time have measured small ripples in the cosmic web using W. M. Keck Observatory images of rare double quasars.

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Marc Delcroix: ‘Getting details on Mars, Jupiter or Saturn is now routine, but seeing details on Uranus and Neptune are the new frontiers for us amateurs and I did not want to miss that’

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Adaptive optics enable astronomers to discover that G2 is a pair of binary stars that merged together, cloaked in gas and dust

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MEDIA RELEASE The board of the W. M. Keck Observatory has announced Hilton Lewis has been appointed Director of Keck Observatory, effective immediately. He has served as the Interim Director since May. “The CARA board is delighted that Hilton has agreed to take on this substantial responsibility,” said Ed Stolper, Chairman of the California Association […]

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UH team maps boundaries of ‘supercluster’ of galaxies stretching 500 million light-years through space

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Erica Nelson: ‘The early universe could make these galaxies, but the modern universe can’t. It was this hotter, more turbulent place — these were boiling cauldrons forging stars.’

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Steve Howell: ‘However, what we can do is eliminate essentially all other possibilities so that the validity of these planets is really the only viable option.’

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MEDIA RELEASE Two teams of scientists score big with Keck Observatory this week. The first group discovered the first known cosmic web filament while the second directly imaged a brown dwarf for the first time. Rare Brown Dwarf Discovery Provides Benchmark for Future Exoplanet Research A team of researchers led by Justin R. Crepp, the […]

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MEDIA RELEASE The Board of Directors of the W. M. Keck Observatory has announced Taft Armandroff, executive director of the world’s premier ground-based astronomical observatory, will step down June 1 to become a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and director of its McDonald Observatory. Armandroff joined Keck Observatory in June 2006. During […]

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MEDIA RELEASE A team of astronomers has found the first Earth-sized planet outside the solar system that has a rocky composition like that of Earth. This exoplanet, known as Kepler-78b, orbits its star very closely every 8.5 hours, making it much too hot to support life. The results are being published in the journal Nature. […]

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Steven Finkelstein: ‘There are way more regions of very high star formation than we previously thought. … There must be a decent number of them if we happen to find two in the same area of the sky.’

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