Word: djorgovski
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...George Djorgovski is using the Keck as well, but where Marcy's quarries are no more than 200 light-years way, Djorgovski's are closer to 10 billion. A professor at Caltech, Djorgovski has lately been concentrating on gamma-ray bursts--mysterious flashes of high-energy radiation that have baffled astronomers for nearly 40 years. If these blips of electromagnetic energy can be seen from far across the universe, as some astronomers believe, then they must briefly shine as bright as the rest of the stars in the universe put together--a seemingly preposterous assertion...
...Djorgovski and his colleagues used the Keck to take visible-light pictures of a burst first spotted by the Compton Gamma Ray Observer satellite--and sure enough, it came from billions of light-years away. To date, the best explanation theorists have come up with is that the bursts come from "hypernovas," massive stars exploding with hitherto unsuspected power. "I feel really fortunate," says Djorgovski. "This was a world-class mystery, and the Keck allowed us to help solve...
UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez, meanwhile, has focused her attention on the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, far closer than Djorgovski's gamma-ray bursts but hundreds of times farther away than Marcy's planets. Shrouded in thick clouds of dust, the galactic core is invisible to ordinary light detectors. But among the Keck's suite of specialized instruments is an electronic camera sensitive to infrared light--the same kind of invisible light that your remote control uses to communicate with your TV. Infrared light of some wavelengths can penetrate dust as though it weren't there, giving...
Armed with a new generation of adaptive-optics systems now under development, these futuristic scopes will once again revolutionize astronomy. "When we were planning for the Keck in the early days," recalls Caltech's Djorgovski, "we laid out some of the science we expected to do with it. And we were much too conservative: we missed most of the really important stuff we've actually found. I predict the same thing will happen with these enormous telescopes. We'll almost certainly find things we never could have imagined...