Asteroids named after UH astronomers
Naming asteroids is serious business.
Lunar eclipse aids in locating 3 Near-Earth asteroids
Every night, the University of Hawaiʻi Pan-STARRS telescopes on Hakeakalā scan the sky for Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), asteroids or comets that may come close to or even hit Earth in the future.
30-year stellar survey cracks mysteries of galaxy’s giant planets
Current and former astronomers from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have wrapped up a massive collaborative study that set out to determine if most solar systems in the universe are similar to our own.
Breakthrough: UH team successfully locates incoming asteroid
For the first time, astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi have demonstrated that their ATLAS and Pan-STARRS survey telescopes can provide sufficient warning to move people away from the impact site of an incoming asteroid. They detected a small asteroid prior to its entering the Earth’s atmosphere near Puerto Rico on the morning of June 22, 2019.
Hawaiʻi Team Catches Asteroid As It Self-Destructs
Astronomers once thought asteroids were boring, wayward space rocks that simply orbit around the Sun. New observations are turning these ideas on their heads, showing that asteroids are anything but dull. Asteroid Gault, discovered in 1998, has begun to slowly disintegrate. The crumbling was first detected on Jan. 5, 2019 by the IfA’s ATLAS telescopes on Maunaloa and Haleakalā. Spectacular images of asteroid 6478 Gault from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show two narrow, comet-like tails of debris streaming from the diminutive 2.5-mile-wide asteroid.
