#John O’Meara

From atop Maunakea on the Big Island to around the world, astronomers and citizen stargazers are eagerly awaiting the passage of the interstellar comet through our solar system.

Astronomers have discovered the first-ever spatially resolved, gravitationally lensed superluminous supernova. The object, dubbed SN 2025wny, offers a rare look at a stellar cataclysm from the early Universe and provides a striking confirmation of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The discovery relied on a chain of cutting-edge observatories collaborating on scientific breakthroughs.

A team of researchers using data from W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaiʻi Island, and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has likely discovered a stable trio of icy space rocks in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt. If confirmed, the 148780 Altjira system would be the second known three-body system in the region, suggesting similar triples may exist and supporting a theory about the solar system’s history and early formation of Kuiper Belt objects.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science announced that this year’s winning research paper published in the journal “Science” is co-authored by two astronomers from W. M. Keck Observatory, Chief Scientist John O’Meara and professor J. Xavier Prochaska of UC Santa Cruz. The authors of the research paper titled “A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance” will receive the 2020 AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize on Feb. 10 at a virtual ceremony.