Thirty meter telescope on mauna kea12/29/2023 Last April, the Gemini Observatory there released a photograph of the oldest object ever seen-a gamma-ray burst measured at a redshift of 8.2. Mauna Kea's telescopes have advanced studies of galactic evolution, the formation of stars and planets, and our own solar system. Keck's twin 10-meter telescopes, operated by the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, and Japan's 8.2-meter Subaru telescope. Many of the world's principal observatories on the planet are situated atop Mauna Kea-and above 40 percent of Earth's atmosphere-including the W. "After taking a short walk for a minute, nearly everyone feels dizzy," he says. Geoff Marcy, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, says the thin atmosphere takes its toll: Although the stars are spectacular, it's actually hard to focus on them at Mauna Kea's altitude. At 4,205 meters above the Pacific Ocean, the summit of Mauna Kea commands a stunning view of the world below-and the universe above. The oxygen thins, the temperature drops to freezing, and the sky deepens to dark blue. On a trip to the observatory sites, visitors quickly leave the lush tropics and enter a stark environment that NASA's Mars rovers might recognize. "When you go outside at night and look up, it is like looking through a window straight into the heart of the universe." "The nighttime sky at Mauna Kea is simply spectacular," says Michael Bolte, director of University of California Observatories and a member of the board that chose this summit as the site for the TMT. And it is no mystery why it is home to one of the world's largest collections of observatories, with 13 operated by scientists from 11 countries. It's no surprise for scientists that the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on Hawaii's Big Island, was the choice for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), one of a handful of next-generation optical telescopes that aims to propel ground-based astronomy in the 21st century.įor professional astronomers, rarified air and dizzy spells are a small price to pay for Mauna Kea's front-row seat on the cosmos.
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