Observing billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky and building a 3D map of the universe are all part of the Euclid mission that the European Space Agency launched with its Euclid satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Euclid’s dataset is getting a big helping hand from observations taken at three observatories in �鶹��ý.

The Euclid satellite mission will spend more than six years in space and involve more than 2,000 scientists, including astronomers in �鶹��ý. Unlike the James Webb Space Telescope, which observes a tiny portion of the universe in great detail, Euclid will survey a large portion of the sky, to see a massive section of the universe.

Prior to Euclid’s launch, the work of creating the map began in �鶹��ý through the project, an ambitious imaging survey of the northern sky in the optical and near-infrared conducted by three �鶹��ý-based telescopes since 2017: the Canada-France-�鶹��ý Telescope (CFHT), Japan’s Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, and the University of �鶹��ý (IfA) Pan-STARRS telescope on Haleakalā, Maui.

UNIONS is co-led by Jean-Charles Cuillandre of CEA Saclay/Université Paris-Saclay, along with Ken Chambers at IfA, Alan McConnachie at Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (DAO) in Canada, Oguri Masamune at Chiba University in Japan, and Mike Hudson at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

“The superb observing conditions in �鶹��ý led to the unprecedented collection of galaxies over a very large area of the sky with each telescope playing a critical role by adding different filters or colors to the Euclid data,” said Cuillandre, a former CFHT staff astronomer. “While a critical part of the original motivation to obtain the UNIONS data was the Euclid mission, the data will have an impact extending far beyond the space mission.”

The IfA team is especially interested in using this data to measure the parameters that characterize the properties of the universe.

“The Euclid mission will provide a next generation measurement of these characteristics, and we may discover we have made a mistake or series of small mistakes along the way, or we may find that dark energy is more complicated than in Einstein’s formulation,” said Chambers. “Or there might be something else, some new aspect of the universe that we are presently unaware of.”

�鶹��ý adds color

By observing more than one-third of the observable sky outside the Milky Way, Euclid will image billions of targets out to a distance of 10 billion light years. Astronomers estimate the distances to these galaxies—and thus convert 2D images to a 3D map of the universe—using their observed brightness in different color filters. The more filters are used, the better the distance estimate. But Euclid has only four filters—one that spans most of what we see as visible light, and three that cover infrared wavelengths, beyond what our eyes can see.

The �鶹��ý telescopes will add observations in five visible-light filters, spanning the rainbow from the violet to far-red. In other words, the three �鶹��ý telescopes turn the black and white 2D images from Euclid into a full color, 3D map of the universe. Because Euclid is mapping such a huge swath of sky, and ground-based telescopes have different capabilities, multiple observatories have to contribute to provide all the data.

“The idea for one filter from space and additional filters from ground-based telescopes was the Euclid plan from the beginning. Subaru observations add far-red and green, Pan-STARRS has been observing the sky for years searching for asteroids allowing a depth of red data, and CFHT adds blue, enhancing the one filter images that Euclid will produce,” said Professor Satoshi Miyazaki, director of Subaru Telescope. “UNIONS is a consortium of telescopes in �鶹��ý, extending broader than just Euclid. UNIONS scientists are also sharing data to conduct research collaborations based on �鶹��ý.”

Gravitational lensing

“Ultimately, data from the �鶹��ý telescopes—CFHT, Subaru, and Pan-STARRS—will turn the images into a three-dimensional map of our Universe.”

Dark matter does not emit light like the more familiar planets, stars and galaxies. However, dark matter has gravity and can be detected by observing large clusters of galaxies. In some cases, the immense gravity of a galaxy or cluster of galaxies can bend light from an object behind it, known as gravitational lensing. Ground-based observations will assist astronomers working on the Euclid gravitational lensing project.

“I have worked on the Euclid mission for 12 years and it is very satisfying to see the mission launch,” said Jean-Gabriel Cuby, CFHT executive director and Euclid board member. “Much like with the James Webb Space Telescope, Euclid will surprise us and lead to insights we do not fully anticipate. Insights enabled by the efforts of the teams at CFHT, Subaru and Pan-STARRS.”

The first images from the Euclid mission are expected in around two months. Euclid will build up a large archive of unique data, unprecedented by volume for a space-based mission, enabling research over all disciplines in astronomy. The data will be archived at the Canadian Astronomy Data Center (CADC) and accessible to astronomers around the world. CADC will also provide color information based on the observations from the �鶹��ý based telescopes.

“The Euclid images will be beautiful to look at, above and beyond the considerable scientific value of the data. I’m looking forward to seeing them,” said Stephen Gwyn, science data specialist at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre. “Ultimately, data from the �鶹��ý telescopes—CFHT, Subaru, and Pan-STARRS—will turn the images into a three-dimensional map of our Universe.”

Mysteries have swirled around the origin of interstellar object ʻOumuamua since astronomers on Haleakalā first discovered it in 2017 with the University of �鶹��ý (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) telescope.

The published in Nature envisions ʻOumuamua as a water-rich comet traveling through the space between stars. Over time, ʻOumuamua was bombarded by radiation, which formed hydrogen inside the comet. As hydrogen gas released from the interstellar comet, it accelerated.

The new study speculated how hydrogen came off ʻOumuamua, which researchers wouldn’t have been able to detect. When water ice sits in space, the cosmic radiation interacts with it and produces hydrogen. When the hydrogen escaped, it created the acceleration that researchers originally observed, explaining why ʻOumuamua was accelerating, and nobody saw gas.

However, this theory does not explain the elongated shape of ʻOumuamua.

“I don’t disbelieve it, but I don’t think it is necessary to explain ʻOumuamua,” said Astronomer Karen Meech, who was the leader of the team that first characterized the object. “I think it could be just an ordinary comet. The reason people didn’t think it could be just an ordinary comet is because all of the observations we had couldn’t fit together in a nice model. But people forget that we only observed it in detail for a little over a week. I think we just didn’t have enough data to do a comprehensive model that would fit all of the observations, yet we are trying anyway.”

ʻOumuamua, originally an object from another star system, has come close enough to Earth for astronomers to study. Usually, observing objects from other star systems only provides astronomers with remote observations that do not provide many details.

“One thing that is very interesting is how much effort is going to try and explain this one. It is the first of its kind that has ever been detected, it was a �鶹��ýdiscovery which makes it exciting,” said Meech. “The level of scientific interest that has come from all directions is fascinating.”

Alien hypothesis not following scientific process

Most researchers from the scientific community can find common ground on what ʻOumuamua is. However, a Harvard professor continues to speculate that the object could be designed by an extraterrestrial intelligent civilization.

“Almost all of the scientific community thinks that it is a leftover building block from the process of forming planets,” said Meech. “There is one person who seems to be pushing the alien hypothesis. He has gone out on a limb, and now I fear he can’t back down.”

“I would’ve been happy if he had said ‘what would it take us to consider the evidence that would be necessary for us to go down the path that this is alien technology?’ That would have been okay because that is part of the scientific process,” added Meech. “But he has just outright declared that it is. The problem with that is that it is teaching students not to follow the scientific process.”

UH at the forefront

PAN-STARRS1 is the world’s leading Near Earth Object discovery telescope and is superb at
finding faint, distant comets. After finding ʻOumuamua, Meech believes that there are going to be more opportunities in the future.

“To find one without a comet tail must mean they are awfully abundant. I think UH will be at the forefront of following these things. All of the big telescopes around the world are going to go after the next one and we hope to be leading the pack here at UH.”

What does our universe look like at the largest size scales? A team of researchers from the University of �鶹��ý (IfA) and in Hungary has produced a massive new catalog of high-fidelity distance estimates to more than 350 million galaxies, revealing the soap-bubble structure of the universe in detail.

The team used data from UH’s or Pan-STARRS1 (PS1) on Haleakalā and the space-based (WISE) mission to first classify objects as stars, quasars, and galaxies, and then estimate the distances to galaxies. IfA’s Pan-STARRS1 Sky Survey data is currently the largest public imaging survey in visible light. In combination with WISE, this provides brightnesses for each object in nine different color filters and many other parameters.

• Related UH News story: Largest digital sky survey released by Pan-STARRS, December 19, 2016

IfA Astronomer István Szapudi said, “Combining the optical PS1 with the spaced-based infrared colors of WISE yields a large and homogeneous map of the universe extending out 10 billion light-years. We are seeing the structure of the universe back to when it was less than half of its present age.”

The catalog, WISE-PS1-STRM, is now available to the public on . Research was recently published in the .

In addition to the two massive datasets, the team applied special computational methods they developed to analyze object colors and shapes and extract their types and distances.

“These deep-learning tools have been refined and improved so they now produce classifications and distances that are accurate to one percent,” said Robert Beck, a former cosmology postdoctoral fellow at IfA.

According to researchers, the catalog will be useful in a vast number of scientific projects, and paves the way for similar work from future space-based projects such as Euclid, a near-infrared space telescope under development in Europe focused on researching dark energy and dark matter by accurately measuring the acceleration of the universe.

A near-Earth asteroid about the size of a Ferris wheel first detected in 2016 by the University of �鶹��ý (IfA)-operated (Pan-STARRS) may shed some light on the early Solar System. New data published in indicates (469219) Kamoʻoalewa could be a fragment of the Moon.

According to the study, the infrared spectrum of the 165-foot long object appears to match that of material found on the lunar surface. To help determine its origin, China is preparing for a spacecraft launch in 2024 in an attempt to retrieve samples from the asteroid.

“To my knowledge, this is the most promising evidence to date of an asteroid actually being a remnant from a past lunar impact,” said IfA Director Doug Simons. “The best way to determine if it is of lunar origin is a sample-and-return mission, so precise chemical analyses can be made to compare material from Kamoʻoalewa with material brought back to earth from past Apollo missions to the surface of the moon.”

More than just a name

This recent research has topped international and national headlines, such as leading astronomy publications and the New York Times where the asteroid’s Hawaiian language name is widely utilized. The use of ʻōlelo �鶹��ý (Hawaiian language) on such a large scale is both uplifting and encouraging news for UH Hilo Executive Director Kaʻiu Kimura who helped spearhead the naming of the �鶹��ý-discovered Near Earth Object through , a program where Hawaiian speaking students and educators work with �鶹��ý-based astronomers to create names in ʻōlelo �鶹��ý for objects discovered by �鶹��ý-based observatories.

“We were very encouraged to see the recent theory on Kamoʻoalewa. The students who gave the name Kamoʻoalewa put a lot of thought and energy into researching appropriate contexts,” Kimura said. “They did in fact consider that this object may have been a ‘moʻo’ or ‘offspring’ that is orbiting in our solar system. It is amazing to now see scientific theory support their keen intuition.”

• Related UH News story: Hawaiian students learn, name astronomical discoveries through ʻImiloa program, January, 8, 2019

In ʻōlelo �鶹��ý, Kamoʻoalewa alludes to a celestial object that is oscillating, like its path in the sky as viewed from the Earth. It is a name found in the Hawaiian chant Kumulipo.

A Hua He Inoa is also behind the names of five other celestial discoveries, including the headline grabbing interstellar object ʻOumuamua. The program is a collaborative effort between ʻImiloa, IfA, community members and UH �ᾱ����’s .

“As I’ve mentioned before, by naming major astronomical discoveries made from �鶹��ý, A Hua He Inoa is helping give Maunakea and Haleakalā an international voice—it is only fitting that voice is Hawaiian,” Simons explained.

Kamoʻoalewa is about 4 million times fainter than the faintest star the human eye can see in a dark sky and never gets closer than 9 million miles to Earth.

Astronomers are revelling at the discovery of a white dwarf that is the largest ever seen. White dwarfs are the collapsed remnants of stars, and this latest find is roughly the size of the Moon and 1.35 times more massive than the Sun. Researchers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory made the discovery. To help characterize the dead star, astronomers turned to the on Maunakea and University of �鶹��ý’s on Haleakalā, Maui.

In 2016, Pan-STARRS released the world’s largest digital sky survey enabling access to millions of images and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies. That data helped researchers estimate the temperature of the white dwarf and its radius.

“We have enabled astronomers all over the world to continue to make new discoveries,” said Ken Chambers, director of Pan-STARRS Observatories. “This discovery of a highly magnetized and rapidly rotating white dwarf, is one of many, many examples of just how scientifically useful the Pan-STARRS1 Survey has become to the scientific community.”

Using Keck Observatory’s low-resolution imaging spectrometer, the team realized the sheer power of the star’s magnetic field. According to astronomers, the white dwarf’s extreme magnetic field is almost one billion times stronger than the Sun’s and whips around on its axis at a frenzied pace.

Ilaria Caiazzo, a researcher at Caltech is the lead author of the new study based on the white dwarf. The newly discovered object’s size is also considered small in size.

“It may seem counterintuitive, but smaller white dwarfs happen to be more massive,” Caiazzo said. “This is due to the fact that white dwarfs lack the nuclear burning that keep up normal stars against their own self gravity, and their size is instead regulated by quantum mechanics.”

Researchers suspect that the merged white dwarf may be massive enough to evolve into a neutron-rich dead star, or neutron star, which typically forms when a star much more massive than our Sun explodes in a supernova.

For more information go to .

From working to determine if other planets can support life to monitoring the skies for hazardous asteroids and comets, the University of �鶹��ý (IfA) remains at the forefront of cutting edge space science.

On June 3, IfA Interim Director and Astronomer Karen Meech shared with the UH Board of Regents (BOR) Committee on Research and Innovation some of the units research accolades and the sheer impact IfA’s collaboration with observatories on Maunakea and Haleakalā has had on the astronomy field.

UH’s Pan-STARRS1 telescope on Haleakalā is the world leader in finding larger Near-Earth Objects that could pose a threat to the planet. IfA astronomers who operate the observatory on Maui play a fundamental role in the nation’s planetary defense program. In 2017, during routine operations, Pan-STARRS discovered the mysterious interstellar object, ʻOumuamua, the very first of its kind spotted in the solar system. The rapidly rotating object mesmerized researchers around the globe and left many scrambling to explain its origin and where it was headed.

“Most people don’t realize how close to Earth that came, within 63 Earth Moon distances,” said Meech during the BOR presentation. “That’s really close…Pan-STARRS was instrumental in discovering that.”

Vital Maunakea telescopes

Meech explained to the BOR committee how vital telescopes on Maunakea were in unraveling the headline-grabbing object’s mystique. In 2017, with Meech at the helm, IfA led an international research team that gathered data on ʻOumuamua and joined forces with observatories on �鶹��ý Island. “We used everything on Maunakea,” Meech said. “Every telescope was providing a unique piece of science and we had to do it fast…Everyone was willing to share. Pretty much every big telescope on planet Earth was looking at that object for a week but Maunakea did the lion’s share of the analysis.”

• Related UH News story: Mysteries of interstellar ʻOumuamua part of UH speaker series, June 7, 2021

Meech’s team ruled out theories such as ʻOumuamua could be an alien spacecraft sent from a distant civilization. They suggested the interstellar object was of natural origin and possessed similar qualities, such as its red color, to objects found within our own solar system.

Life in Space

Currently, IfA astronomers are contributing to groundbreaking research on the formation of planetary systems and habitable planets. Meech explained to the Board of Regents that IfA has teamed up with other leading astronomy facilities to expand space science in understanding how life evolves, begins and where it can exist. With potential space missions on the horizon to collect essential data, IfA foresees building satellites or telescopic instruments for research quests.

This research is an example of �鶹��ý����ԴDz�’s goals of (PDF) and (PDF), two of four goals identified in the (PDF), updated in December 2020.

Earth has captured a tiny object from its orbit about the Sun and will keep it as a temporary satellite for a few months before it escapes. But the object is not an asteroid; it’s likely an upper stage booster rocket that helped lift NASA‘s ill-fated Surveyor 2 spacecraft toward the Moon in 1966.

University of �鶹��ý’s telescope atop Haleakalā spotted the object in September 2020. Astronomers at the NASA-funded survey telescope noticed it had an unusual motion—it followed a slightly curved path in the sky, which is a signature of it being nearby, with the curvature caused by the rotation of the observer around Earth’s axis as Earth spins. Initially assumed to be a regular space rock orbiting the Sun, it was given an asteroid-like designation: 2020 SO.

“We were pleased to discover this object via its slightly curved motion, even though it was of artificial origin,” said Astronomer Richard Wainscoat, who leads Near-Earth Object observations at Pan-STARRS. “We hope this technique will lead to further interesting discoveries of nearby objects, especially asteroids that might be temporarily captured into Earth’s orbit.”

But scientists at the at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California saw the object’s orbit and suspected it was anything but a normal asteroid.

Most asteroids’ orbits are elongated and tilted relative to ours. But 2020 SO was moving slowly and following a nearly circular orbit around the Sun, closely matching that of Earth’s. In addition, the object’s orbital plane almost exactly matched that of our planet—highly unusual for a typical asteroid.

As astronomers at Pan-STARRS and around the world made additional observations of 2020 SO, the data also started to reveal the degree to which the Sun’s radiation was influencing 2020 SO‘s trajectory—an indication that it may not be an asteroid at all but a suspected rocket booster.

Space Age artifact

The lunar lander was launched toward the Moon on Sept. 20, 1966, on an Atlas-Centaur rocket. The mission was designed to reconnoiter the lunar surface ahead of the Apollo missions that led to the first crewed lunar landing in 1969. Shortly after lift-off, Surveyor 2 separated from its Centaur upper stage booster rocket as intended. But it lost control a day after launch when one of its thrusters failed to ignite, throwing the spacecraft into a spin. The spacecraft crashed into the Moon just southeast of Copernicus crater on September 23, 1966. The discarded Centaur upper stage rocket, meanwhile, sailed past the Moon and disappeared into an unknown orbit about the Sun.

Now, in 2020, the Centaur appears to have returned to Earth for a brief visit. Before it leaves, it will make two large loops around our planet, with its closest approach on December 1. During this period, astronomers will get a closer look and confirm if 2020 SO is indeed an artifact from the early Space Age.

A team of international asteroid and comet experts now agree that ʻOumuamua, the first recorded interstellar visitor, has natural origins, despite previous speculation by some other astronomers that the object could be an alien spacecraft sent from a distant civilization to examine our star system.

A review of all the available evidence by an international team of 14 experts, including Robert Jedicke and Karen Meech of the University of �鶹��ý’s (IfA), strongly suggests that ʻOumuamua has a purely natural origin. The research team reported its findings in the July 1, 2019, issue of Nature Astronomy.

“While ʻOumuamua’s interstellar origin makes it unique, many of its other properties are perfectly consistent with objects in our own solar system,” said Jedicke. ʻOumuamua’s orbit and its path through our solar system matches a prediction published in a scientific journal by Jedicke and his colleagues half a year before ʻOumuamua’s discovery.

“It was exciting and exhausting to coordinate all the ʻOumuamua observations with my co-authors from all around the world,” said Meech. “It really was a 24-hour-a-day effort for the better part of two months. In that paper we established that ʻOumuamua rotates once in about seven hours and that it had a red color similar to many objects locked within our own solar system.”

The work showed that ʻOumuamua must have an extremely elongated shape, like a cigar or maybe a frisbee, unlike any known object in our solar system based on changes in its apparent brightness while it rotated.

UH team provides essential analysis

Meech and other UH researchers were essential to another paper published in Nature a year ago that indicated ʻOumuamua is accelerating along its trajectory as it leaves our solar system. This behavior is typical of comets but astronomers have found no other visual evidence of the gas or dust emissions that create this acceleration.

• Related UH News story: An interstellar visitor unmasked, November 20, 2017

“While it is disappointing that we could not confirm the cometary activity with telescopic observations, it is consistent with the fact that ʻOumuamua’s acceleration is very small and must therefore be due to the ejection of just a small amount of gas and dust,” Meech explained.

“We have never seen anything like ʻOumuamua in our solar system,” said Matthew Knight of the University of Maryland. “Our preference is to stick with analogs we know, unless, or until we find something unique. The alien spacecraft hypothesis is a fun idea, but our analysis suggests there is a whole host of natural phenomena that could explain it.”

Team assessment

The team of astronomers hailing from the U.S. and Europe met late last year at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland, to critically assess all the available research and observations on ʻOumuamua and will meet again later this year. Their first priority was to determine whether there is any evidence to support the hypothesis that ʻOumuamua is a spacecraft built by an alien civilization.

“We put together a strong team of experts in various different areas of work on ʻOumuamua. This cross-pollination led to the first comprehensive analysis and the best big-picture summary to date of what we know about the object,” Knight explained. “We tend to assume that the physical processes we observe here, close to home, are universal. And we haven’t yet seen anything like ʻOumuamua in our solar system. This thing is weird and admittedly hard to explain, but that doesn’t exclude other natural phenomena that could explain it.”

• Related UH News story: Is the interstellar asteroid really a comet?, June 27, 2018

The ISSI team considered all the available information in peer-reviewed scientific journals and paid special attention to the research published by IfA researchers. In particular, Meech’s research paper in the journal Nature first reported on ʻOumuamua’s discovery and characteristics in December 2017, just two months after the unusual object was identified by Pan-STARRS1 (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) on Haleakalā.

The ISSI team considered a number of mechanisms by which ʻOumuamua could have escaped from its home system. For example, the object could have been ejected by a gas giant planet orbiting another star. According to this theory, Jupiter created our own solar system’s Oort cloud, a population of small objects only loosely gravitationally bound to our Sun in a gigantic shell extending to about a third of the distance to the nearest star. Some of the objects in our Oort cloud eventually make it back into our solar system as long period comets while others may have slipped past the influence of the Sun’s gravity to become interstellar travelers themselves.

More interstellar visitors expected

The research team expects that ʻOumuamua is just the first of many interstellar visitors discovered passing through our solar system, and they are collectively looking forward to data from the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) that is scheduled to be operational in 2022. The LSST, located in Chile, may detect one interstellar object every year and allow astronomers to study the properties of objects from many other solar systems.

While ISSI team members hope that LSST will detect more interstellar objects, they think it is unlikely that astronomers will ever detect an alien spacecraft passing through our solar system and they are convinced that ʻOumuamua was a unique and extremely interesting but completely natural object.

For the first time, astronomers at the University of �鶹��ý have demonstrated that the UH and survey telescopes can provide sufficient warning to move people away from the impact site of an incoming asteroid. The telescopes detected a small asteroid prior to its entering the Earth’s atmosphere near Puerto Rico on the morning of June 22, 2019.

The 4-meter diameter asteroid, which is about the size of a car and named 2019 MO, was observed four times in a span of 30 minutes by the ATLAS facility on Mauna Loa on �鶹��ý Island, at around midnight �鶹��ý time on the morning of Saturday, June 22. At that point, the asteroid was only 500,000 km from Earth—1.3 times the distance to the Moon. These initial observations were assessed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) Scout impact analysis software, and the asteroid was given a modest impact rating of 2 (a rating of 4 is “likely”). However, JPL’s Davide Farnocchia noted a possible match with an atmospheric infrasound detection over Puerto Rico about 12 hours later, and he asked if the community could search for additional observations.

Luckily, the Pan-STARRS 2 (PS2) telescope on Haleakalā was operating at the same time, and two hours prior to the ATLAS observations had imaged the part of the sky where 2019 MO should have been seen. The asteroid was located on a part of the PS2 camera that is not fully operational, but PS2 scientists Robert Weryk and Mark Huber at the UH Institute for Astronomy and Marco Micheli at the European Space Agency were able to analyze these PS2 images and find the asteroid.

With these additional PS2 observations, the asteroid’s entry path prediction improved significantly, and new calculations by the Scout software increased the impact rating to 4 or “likely.” The improved orbit calculation also matched the infrasound detection with very high likelihood. The Nexrad weather radar in San Juan, Puerto Rico, also detected 2019 MO as it burnt up in the atmosphere, and pinpointed the entry location over the ocean, about 380 km south of San Juan, closely corresponding to the infrasound location.

Scanning the skies

ATLAS consists of two telescopes, 100 miles apart, with one on Mauna Loa, �鶹��ý Island, and one on Haleakalā, Maui. They automatically scan the whole sky every two nights, looking in all directions and see asteroids before they can hit the Earth. ATLAS currently discovers about 100 asteroids with diameters bigger than 30 meters every year.

Scientists estimate that asteroid 2019 MO was much smaller, only about 4 meters (13 feet) across. An asteroid that small would likely burn up entirely as it entered Earth’s atmosphere. The ATLAS telescopes can detect even such small objects about half a day before they arrive. It will find larger objects, like the one that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in 2013, a few days before they impact. That asteroid was about 20 meters across or the size of a house.

ATLAS and Pan-STARRS are funded by grants from the NASA Near-Earth Object Observations program.

More about UH ATLAS: UH ATLAS telescope pinpoints meteorite impact prediction, July 13, 2018; UH ATLAS telescope spots SpaceX Tesla Roadster in flight, February 9, 2018

More about Pan-STARRS at UH News.

Astronomers once thought asteroids were boring, wayward space rocks that simply orbit around the sun. Only in science fiction movies were they dramatic, changing objects.

New observations are turning science fiction into science fact, showing that asteroids are anything but dull. Asteroid Gault, discovered in 1998, has begun to slowly disintegrate. The crumbling was first detected earlier this year on January 5, by the University of �鶹��ý at ����ԴDz� (IfA) (ATLAS) telescopes on Mauna Loa and Haleakalā. Later investigation proved there were no asteroid collisions.

“Each night the ATLAS survey scans the sky looking for hazardous near-Earth asteroids, and we also observe tens of thousands of known asteroids in the main asteroid belt,” said Larry Denneau, an ATLAS project scientist. “Our collaborator Ken Smith in Belfast, Ireland, found an unusual looking moving object, and he alerted us that it might be a new comet. Instead, it turned out to be an asteroid in the main belt that just developed a comet-like tail. These events are rare and mysterious, and we were lucky to detect the event right after its turn-on.”

Rare asteroid behavior

Gault is a well-known asteroid and the newly found tails are the first evidence of any misbehavior. These new observations suggest that asteroids are dynamic, active worlds that can ultimately disintegrate due to the long-term subtle effect of sunlight, which can slowly spin them up until they begin to shed material.

Astronomers estimate that this type of event is rare, occurring roughly once a year among the 800,000 known asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. That’s why only the latest astronomical surveys—like ATLAS—that map vast swaths of the sky nightly, can catch asteroids as they fall apart.

“Asteroids such as Gault cannot escape detection anymore,” noted Olivier Hainaut, a member of the observing team of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. “That means that all these asteroids that start misbehaving get caught.”

Observations find archival evidence

Once the new tail was discovered, Denneau and IfA colleague Robert Weryk looked back into archival data from ATLAS and the UH (Pan-STARRS) telescopes. The tail also turned up in data taken as far back as December 2018. In mid-January, a second shorter tail was detected by IfA astronomer Jan Kleyna using the Canada France �鶹��ý Telescope, as well as by other observers. An analysis of both tails suggests the two dust releases occurred last year around October 28 and December 30.

Tantalized by this new discovery, IfA astronomers Kleyna and Karen Meech, along with colleagues worldwide, began to observe Gault with telescopes around the world and in space. Spectacular images of asteroid 6478 Gault from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show two narrow, comet-like tails of debris streaming from the 2.5-mile-wide asteroid. The tails are telltale evidence that Gault is beginning to come apart by gently puffing off material in two separate episodes over the past several months.

Gault is only the second asteroid uncovered whose disintegration is decisively linked to a spin-up process, known as a YORP (Yarkovsky–O’Keefe–Radzievskii–Paddack) torque. When sunlight heats an asteroid, infrared radiation escaping from its warmed surface carries off momentum as well as heat. This creates a tiny force that can cause the asteroid to spin faster and faster. If this centrifugal force overcomes gravity, the surface becomes unstable, and landslides send dust and rubble drifting into space.

The University of �鶹��ý at ����ԴDz� (IfA), in conjunction with the (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, is releasing the second edition of data from —the world’s largest digital sky survey.

This second release contains more than 1.6 petabytes of data, making it the largest volume of astronomical information ever released. The amount of imaging data is equivalent to two billion selfies or 30,000 times the total text content of Wikipedia. The catalog data is 15 times the volume of the Library of Congress.

• Read about the first Pan-STARRS digital release

“Pan-STARRS DR2 represents a vast quantity of astronomical data, with many great discoveries already unveiled,” said Heather Flewelling, IfA researcher and a key designer of the PS1 database. “These discoveries just barely scratch the surface of what is possible, however, and the astronomy community will now be able to dig deep, mine the data and find the astronomical treasures within that we have not even begun to imagine.”

The Pan-STARRS observatory consists of a 1.8-meter telescope equipped with a 1.4 billion pixel digital camera, located at the summit of Haleakalā on Maui. Conceived and developed by IfA, it embarked on a digital survey of the sky in visible and near-infrared light in May 2010.

Pan-STARRS was the first survey to observe the entire sky visible from �鶹��ý multiple times in many colors of light. One of the survey’s goals was to identify moving, transient, and variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth. The survey took approximately four years to complete, scanning the sky 12 times in five filters.

This second data release provides, for the first time, access to all of the individual exposures during different period of time. Astronomers and public users of the archive to search the full survey for high-energy explosive events in the cosmos, discover moving objects in our own solar system, and explore the time domain of the universe.

Learn more about Pan-STARRS digital release at the Institute for Astronomy.

December 19, 2016: Largest digital sky survey released by Pan-STARRS

astronomer has been named as one of the ’ 84 newly chosen members. Tonry, who has been with the UH ����ԴDz� since 1996, joins an elite group of fewer than 2,400 exceptional scientists worldwide. Academy members are recognized for their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Tonry is an expert in developing technologies to survey the sky to find moving and variable objects such as exploding stars and asteroids. He is currently spearheading the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) project, a pair of half-meter telescopes that patrol the entire visible sky twice per night to provide warning of an asteroid on its final, impact trajectory. He has played a fundamental role in developing the Pan-STARRS survey, the world’s leading observatory for detecting comets, asteroids and other variable and moving objects.

“This is well-deserved recognition for John’s outstanding contributions to astronomical research—including the High-z Supernovae Program (accelerating Universe), Pan-STARRS, and most recently ATLAS,” said UH Institute for Astronomy Director Bob McLaren.

Tonry has worked in the development of innovative CCD camera sensors; he co-invented the Orthogonal Transfer CCD, which can shift charge in all four directions. These devices allow astronomers to move the accumulating electrons around on the detector itself to follow objects as they are distorted by the atmosphere, reducing blurring and producing sharper images.

Combining his expertise in creating imaging devices, wide-field cameras, and cosmology, Tonry was an integral part of early searches for Type 1a supernovae—exploding white dwarf stars that can be used to measure distances to far-flung galaxies. Such beacons, seen across the age of the universe, can tell us whether the expansion of the universe has changed significantly since the Big Bang, This work became part of the 1996 announcement that the universe is undergoing an accelerating expansion because of “dark energy”—a discovery that was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Throughout his career, Tonry has leveraged a rare combination of scientific and technological insight and innovation to address a diverse array of questions in astronomy. His research has spanned fields from the expansion of the universe, through galaxy distances, to identifying life-threatening asteroids.

Tonry joins six UH ����ԴDz� members of the National Academy of Sciences, Edward DeLong, David Karl, Margaret McFall-Ngai, Steven Stanley, David Ward and Ryuzo Yanagimachi.

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—is less than a quarter-mile (400 meters) in diameter and is moving remarkably fast. Astronomers are urgently working to point telescopes around the world and in space at this notable object. Once these data are obtained and analyzed, astronomers may know more about the origin and possibly the composition of the object.

A/2017 U1 was discovered on October 19 by the University of �鶹��ý’s during the course of its nightly search for Near-Earth Objects for NASA. Rob Weryk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of �鶹��ý (IfA), was first to identify the moving object and submit it to the Minor Planet Center. Weryk subsequently searched the Pan-STARRS image archive and found it was present in images taken the previous night, but was not initially identified by the moving object processing.

Weryk immediately realized this was an unusual object. “Its motion could not be explained using either a normal solar system asteroid or comet orbit,” he said. Weryk contacted IfA graduate Marco Micheli, who had the same realization using his own follow-up images taken at the European Space Agency’s telescope on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. But with the combined data, everything made sense. “This object came from outside our solar system.”

“This is the most extreme orbit I have ever seen,” said Davide Farnocchia, a scientist at (CNEOS) at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “It is going extremely fast and on such a trajectory that we can say with confidence that this object is on its way out of the solar system and not coming back.”

The CNEOS team plotted the object’s current trajectory and even looked into its future. A/2017 U1 came from the direction of the constellation Lyra, cruising through interstellar space at a brisk clip of 15.8 miles (25.5 kilometers) per second.

The object approached our solar system from almost directly “above” the ecliptic, the plane in space near where the planets and most asteroids orbit the Sun, so it did not have any close encounters with the eight major planets during its plunge toward the Sun. On September 2, the small body crossed under the ecliptic just inside of Mercury’s orbit and then made its closest approach to the Sun on September 9. Pulled by the Sun’s gravity, the object made a hairpin turn under our solar system, passing below Earth’s orbit on October 14 at a distance of about 15 million miles (24 million kilometers)—about 60 times the distance to the Moon. It has now shot back up above the plane of the planets and, travelling at 27 miles per second (44 kilometers per second) with respect to the Sun, the object is speeding toward the constellation Pegasus.

“We have long suspected that these objects should exist, because during the process of planet formation a lot of material should be ejected from planetary systems. What’s most surprising is that we’ve never seen interstellar objects pass through before,” said , an astronomer at IfA specializing in small bodies and their connection to solar system formation.

The small body has been assigned the temporary designation A/2017 U1 by the Minor Planet Center (MPC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where all observations on small bodies in our solar system—and now those just passing through—are collected. Said MPC Director Matt Holman, “This kind of discovery demonstrates the great scientific value of continual wide-field surveys of the sky, coupled with intensive follow-up observations, to find things we wouldn’t otherwise know are there.”

Since this is the first object of its type ever discovered, rules for naming this type of object will need to be established by the International Astronomical Union.

“We have been waiting for this day for decades,” said CNEOS Manager Paul Chodas. “It’s long been theorized that such objects exist—asteroids or comets moving around between the stars and occasionally passing through our solar system—but this is the first such detection. So far, everything indicates this is likely an interstellar object, but more data would help to confirm it.“

—By Roy Gal

University of �鶹��ý researchers played a major role in one of the most significant astronomical discoveries in decades—the first observations of a binary neutron star merger and resulting kilonova explosion. The discovery fundamentally affects our understanding of the origin of many of the elements common on Earth and in our bodies.

, together with their international collaborators, announced the discovery in articles published today in Science, Nature and The Astrophysical Journal. They were part of the largest armada of telescopes, researchers and astronomers ever mobilized after the gravitational waves from a binary neutron star merger were detected for the first time.

Unprecedented mobilization of the world’s astronomical community

It started on August 11, when two neutron stars, the remains of dead massive stars, were spiraling toward each other in a distant galaxy, generating gravitational waves as they got closer and closer before colliding. Back on Earth, the , whose creators were recently awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, detected these ripples in the fabric of space. A mere 1.7 seconds later, detected a burst of high-energy gamma-rays. Alerts of the observations with a rough estimate of the location were quickly sent to the world’s astronomical community.

UH researchers play a significant role

Astronomer Benjamin Shappee, who joined the UH ����ԴDz� in September, is part of the One-Meter-Two-Hemisphere (1M2H) team that leapt into action. This small team, a collaboration between Carnegie Observatories and UH’s on Haleakalā, Maui confirmed that the object was indeed a binary neutron star merger and kilonova. Pan-STARRS obtained new images of the source and compared them with previous images taken by Pan-STARRS of the same area, and with the brightness initially observed by the 1M2H team. They found that the object was dimming rapidly.

“A new astronomical object fading this fast is unheard of,” said Ken Chambers, director of the Pan-STARRS Observatory. “This was the signature of a kilonova and the Pan-STARRS Team alerted the world to the unique nature of SSS17a.”

After the Pan-STARRS confirmation, many of the observatories in the world and in orbit changed course to observe the phenomenon in a massive international effort unprecedented in the history of astronomy.

Changing our understanding of the universe

The picture that emerged over the following two weeks was that the bluish object seen initially, changed into a redder and strangely colorful object the likes of which has never been seen before. The final piece of the puzzle came from spectra, a band of colors, like those in a rainbow, taken by the UH astronomers and their international collaborators on a variety of telescopes.

“The fingerprints of key elements are there,” said Chambers. “Heavy elements that are found on Earth and even in our bodies.” It was long believed that these heavy elements came from single massive stars exploding in a supernova long before our solar system was formed.

“Now there is a new blossoming field of study in astronomy,” said Shappee. “This will be the focus of hundreds of astronomers, from around the world, for months and years to come.”

More than 1,000 institutions are expected to produce scientific papers authored by more than 3,500 astronomers. Shappee, Chambers are other UH researchers are lead- and co-authors in the articles published today in Science, Nature and The Astrophysical Journal.

The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) project at the University of �鶹��ý at Mānoa is publicly releasing the world’s largest digital sky survey today, via the (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland.

“The allow anyone to access millions of images and use the database and catalogs containing precision measurements of billions of stars and galaxies,” said Ken Chambers, director of the . “Pan-STARRS has made discoveries from Near Earth Objects and Kuiper Belt Objects in the Solar System to lonely planets between the stars; it has mapped the dust in three dimensions in our galaxy and found new streams of stars; and it has found new kinds of exploding stars and distant quasars in the early universe.”

“With this release we anticipate that scientists—as well as students and even casual users—around the world will make many new discoveries about the universe from the wealth of data collected by Pan-STARRS,” Chambers added.

The , including stars, galaxies and various other objects. The immense collection contains 2 petabytes of data, which is equivalent to one billion selfies, or one hundred times the total content of Wikipedia. 

Four years of observation

The first Pan-STARRS observatory is a 1.8-meter telescope at the summit of Haleakalā, on Maui. In May 2010, it embarked on a digital sky survey of the sky in visible and near infrared light. This was the first survey to observe the entire sky visible from �鶹��ý multiple times in many colors of light, with the goal of finding moving, transient and variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth. The survey took approximately four years to complete, and scanned the sky 12 times in each of five filters.

“Achieving the high quality of the Pan-STARRS1 measurements and maintaining it over such an enormous quantity of data was a unique computational challenge and the results are a tribute to the dedicated efforts of our small team of scientists at the UH IfA and our collaborators who worked to process and calibrate the extraordinary volume of raw image data,” said Eugene Magnier, lead of the Pan-STARRS Image Processing team.

This research program was undertaken by the PS1 Science Consortium—a collaboration among 10 research institutions in four countries with support from NASA and the (NSF). Consortium observations for the sky survey, mapping everything visible from �鶹��ý, were completed in April 2014. This data is now being released publicly.

“It’s great to see the Pan-STARRS1 data release supported by the National Science Foundation now made available to the general astronomical community,” said Nigel Sharp, program director in NSF’s astronomical sciences division. “I am impressed by the work the team invested to make the best-calibrated and best-characterized data set they could. I eagerly anticipate the science from mining these data.”

Two stage roll-out

The roll-out is being done in two stages. Today’s release is the “Static Sky,” which is the average of each of those individual epochs. For every object, there’s an average value for its position, its brightness, and its colors. In 2017, the second set of data will be released, providing a catalog that gives the information and images for each individual epoch.

The Space Telescope Science Institute provides the storage hardware, the computers that handle the database queries, and the user-friendly interfaces to access the data. 

“The cooperation between STScI and the Pan-STARRS team at the University of �鶹��ý has been essential to ensuring that this initial data release is successful,” explained Marc Postman, head of the Community Missions office at STScI, and liaison between STScI and the PS1 Consortium. “STScI was a natural partner to host the Pan-STARRS public archive given its extensive experience serving astronomy data to the international community. In advance of the release of the Pan-STARRS data, STScI staff helped perform checks of data quality, helped write archive user documentation, tested and installed the local data storage and database query system, and designed, built and deployed the web-based user interfaces to the archive system.”

The survey data resides in the (MAST), which serves as NASA’s repository for all of its optical and ultraviolet-light observations, some of which date to the early 1970s. It includes all of the observational data from such space astrophysics missions as Hubble, Kepler, GALEX and a wide variety of other telescopes, as well as several all-sky surveys. Pan-STARRS marks the nineteenth mission to be archived in MAST.

—By Roy Gal

Astronomers at the University of �鶹��ý at Mānoa’s discovered a small asteroid that has been in an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth. The asteroid, designated 2016 HO3, was detected in April by the telescope on Haleakalā, and subsequent research into Pan-STARRS archives revealed faint images of it as far back as 2011.

“It was a very interesting object because it appeared to be very close to the Earth but it appeared to be almost possibly a satellite of the Earth or a quasi satellite of the Earth,” said IfA astronomer Richard Wainscoat.

Collaborating with NASA researchers from other telescopes, the Pan-STARRS astronomers worked out how the new asteroid behaves. As it orbits the sun, 2016 HO3 appears to circle around Earth as well. It is too distant to be considered a true satellite of Earth, but it is the best and most stable example to date of a near-Earth companion, or quasi-satellite. Because of its stable orbit, 2016 HO3 poses no danger to Earth.

“The object may be of interest for future space missions (including both robotic and human) because its velocity relative to Earth is quite low, making it is relatively easy to get to,” said Wainscoat. “It is much further away than the Moon, but much closer than Mars. This could be a bridge to getting to Mars, getting to this object.”

Read more about 2016 HO3 at the .

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory video

The email came in the evening of September 15. A potentially significant event had happened at the , or LIGO, during their engineering run. A ripple in spacetime had occurred somewhere in the universe. But where? LIGO had not yet started their formal observing run, and with only two Gravity Wave detectors, one in Hanford, WA, and one in Livingston, LA, they could not pinpoint where in the sky, amongst billions and billions of galaxies, the source of this disturbance had occurred.

The LIGO team’s first analysis was preliminary, but it showed that two black holes, in tight orbits around each other, had finally spiraled together and merged into a single black hole. The resulting turmoil launched a cascade of vibrations into the very fabric of spacetime that ultimately set the astonishingly sensitive pendulums at LIGO swinging together.

• Related: LIGO news release, February 11, 2016

Pan-STARRS, the University of �鶹��ý’s , was prepared for this eventuality. Built by the University of �鶹��ý’s , the Pan-STARRS1 Telescope spent years mapping the sky to find all kinds of changing celestial objects, all the while building the most detailed map of the sky in five colors. This image of the sky, the PS1 Sky Survey, which will be released to the public this spring through the Space Telescope Science Institute’s MAST Archive, is the ideal resource for trying to find the source of the Gravity Wave Event. If “sparks” fly when black holes merge then a new point of light will be seen in the sky. Pan-STARRS, with its powerful surveying capability, can rapidly map the region of the sky identified by LIGO, compare it to the previous map and find anything that has changed.

Gravity wave hunt begins

To do this, the powerful computers of Pan-STARRS must construct a new image of the sky, and then carefully subtract the pre-existing deep sky image. Whatever remains are the objects that have changed in the universe since the map was made, called “transients.” In the large area provided by LIGO, there will be many more common variable objects like supernovae, stellar flares, highly variable stars, even variations in the active nuclei of galaxies, also fueled by black holes. The team had to eliminate the “normal” ones, and search for something truly new. But Pan-STARRS was prepared for this from its years of ground breaking work on every kind of astronomical transient.

“I’ve been interested in gravity waves since I was kid.” says Pan-STARRS Director , an astronomer at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of �鶹��ý. He jumped at the possibility to sign up with LIGO to get their email alerts. “Most people thought the odds of them finding anything were too small to spend anytime on it, but I was thrilled at the chance.” But when that email came in the night, he knew it would be hard.

The region LIGO had identified as most likely to contain the source was rising with the sun at dawn, observable only for a few minutes before the sky became too bright. With its infrared filters, PanSTARRS could observe the brightening sky for longer, and over the course of a few weeks PS1 was able to map the most important sky regions. PS1 identified 56 astronomical explosions over 41 days after the LIGO event. But what were they?

No unusual behavior detected

Professor , director of the at Queen’s University Belfast, leader of the spectroscopic effort to follow up the Pan-STARRS discoveries, explains: “We didn’t find anything in our data that was likely related to the gravitational wave source. We discovered over 50 new sources that are normal supernovae—exploding stars that we find all the time. We didn’t see any hint of unusual behavior.”

There are two likely reasons. One is that the source was too far in the southern hemisphere, not visible from �鶹��ý. The other is that the source may have been too faint to detect it in the time available. “That is science” says Chambers. “Sometimes all you can report is what you don’t see, because that is important information too. LIGO has opened a brand new field of astronomy and confirmation from facilities like Pan-STARRS will be very important to understanding them.”

A scientific paper describing the details of the Pan-STARRS follow-up effort has been submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The limits Pan-STARRS has set for a potential counterpart will be important for constraining theories of what should have been seen and demonstrate the infrastructure is in place to respond the next time LIGO finds a gravity wave. LIGO will have another observing campaign in the fall, when PS2, the second Pan-STARRS telescope, will be ready, doubling the survey power of the system. Meanwhile, PS1 continues to map the sky every night, seeking the unknown.

—

In 2004, astronomers examining a map of the radiation leftover from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background, or CMB) discovered the Cold Spot, a larger-than-expected unusually cold area of the sky. The physics surrounding the Big Bang theory predicts warmer and cooler spots of various sizes in the infant universe, but a spot this large and this cold was unexpected.

A mysterious large structure

Now, a team of astronomers led by Astronomer István Szapudi of the at the may have found an explanation for the existence of the Cold Spot, which Szapudi says may be “the largest individual structure ever identified by humanity.”

If the Cold Spot originated from the Big Bang itself, it could be a rare sign of exotic physics that the standard cosmology (basically, the Big Bang theory and related physics) does not explain. If, however, it is caused by a foreground structure between Earth and the CMB, it would be a sign that there is an extremely rare large-scale structure in the mass distribution of the universe.

Using data from �鶹��ý’s (PS1) telescope located on Haleakalā, Maui, and NASA’s (WISE) satellite, Szapudi’s team discovered a large supervoid, a vast region 1.8 billion light-years across, in which the density of galaxies is much lower than usual in the known universe.

Not a coincidence

While the existence of the supervoid and its expected effect on the CMB do not fully explain the Cold Spot, it is very unlikely that the supervoid and the Cold Spot at the same location are a coincidence. The team will continue its work using improved data from PS1 and from the Dark Energy Survey being conducted with a telescope in Chile to study the Cold Spot and supervoid, as well as another large void located near the constellation Draco.

The study is being published online on April 20 in . In addition to Szapudi, researchers who contributed to this study include András Kovács, (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary), UH Mānoa alumnus Benjamin Granett (now at the National Institute for Astrophysics, Italy), Zsolt Frei (Eötvös Loránd University) and Joseph Silk (Johns Hopkins).

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—By Louise Good