W.M. Keck Observatory
Hubble Finds Big Brother of Halley’s Comet – Ripped Apart By White Dwarf
February 9, 2017
European Space Agency News Release
Siyi Xu
European Southern Observatory
Garching bei München, Germany
Mathias Jäger
ESA/Hubble, Public Information Officer
Garching, Germany
The international team of astronomers observed the white dwarf WD 1425+540, about 170 light-years from Earth in the constellation Boötes (the Herdsman) [1]. While studying the white dwarf’s atmosphere using both the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the W. M. Keck Observatory the team found evidence that an object rather like a massive comet was falling onto the star, getting tidally disrupted while doing so.
The team determined that the object had a chemical composition similar to the famous Halley’s Comet in our own Solar System, but it was 100,000 times more massive and had twice the proportion of water as its local counterpart. Spectral analysis showed that the destroyed object was rich in the elements essential for life, including carbon, oxygen, sulphur and even nitrogen [2].
New Planet Imager Delivers First Science
Written by Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
January 30, 2017
A new device on the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii has delivered its first images, showing a ring of planet-forming dust around a star, and separately, a cool, star-like body, called a brown dwarf, lying near its companion star.
The device, called a vortex coronagraph, was recently installed inside NIRC2 (Near Infrared Camera 2), the workhorse infrared imaging camera at Keck. It has the potential to image planetary systems and brown dwarfs closer to their host stars than any other instrument in the world.
