#uh ifa

Unlike water that falls from the sky on Earth, solar rain happens in the Sun’s corona, a region of super-hot plasma above its surface. This rain consists of cooler, denser blobs of plasma that fall back down after forming high in the coronae. For decades, scientists struggled to explain how this rain forms so quickly during solar flares.

UKIRT will be the third Maunakea observatory to be decommissioned under UH’s Maunakea Comprehensive Management Plan, following Caltech Submillimeter Observatory and UH Hilo Hōkū Keʻa Observatory, both completed in 2024. 

UH reports that innovations developed or tested by the UH88 have shaped astronomy worldwide and include breakthrough digital imaging, adaptive optics and the HAWAII near-infrared detectors used on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

A team at the University of Hawaiʻi’s Institute for Astronomy has uncovered a dazzling new kind of cosmic explosion, more energetic than anything seen before.

NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies estimates a 1% chance that asteroid 2024 YR4 could collide with Earth in 2032, based on current observations. Throughout the coming months, astronomers will closely monitor the 180-foot (55-meter)-wide object to refine its orbit and improve predictions of its future trajectory. No asteroid of this size has ever reached a 1% impact probability in the past two decades of near-Earth object tracking, making 2024 YR4 a rare and closely watched case.

A University of Hawaiʻi telescope on Maunakea will play a key role in a newly approved $19.5 million NASA space mission that will put an artificial “star” in orbit around the Earth. The star will be a satellite that scientists will use to precisely calibrate telescopes and more accurately measure the brightness of objects ranging from nearby stars to distant explosions of supernovae in far-off galaxies. As part of the NASA Landolt Space Mission, astronomers at the UH Institute for Astronomy (IfA) will utilize observations to generate fresh star brightness catalogs.

This new mission aims to unambiguously identify and classify about 25 Earth-like exoplanets to determine if they possess atmospheres suitable for life. The UH team will provide the sensors for that project.

The Pan-STARRS telescope atop Haleakalā on Maui has collected data that is now being released as the largest catalog of exploding stars. The data from the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy’s Pan-STARRS telescope contains three years of research and is now publicly available via the Young Supernova Experiment.

The Faulkes North telescope atop Haleakalā on Maui, is among the observatories that University of Hawaiʻi astronomers will use to track the impact of a planned crash between a spacecraft and an asteroid.

With both the PS1 and PS2 telescopes operational on Maui, the area of sky surveyed for Near-Earth Objects each night has now doubled.

”Ground-based observations from Maunakea will be critical for turning the JWST images into a three-dimensional map of the universe,” said David Sanders, lead IfA investigator.

The Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy is publicly releasing the world’s largest digital sky survey today compiled using the 1.8 meter telescope atop the summit of Haleakalā on Maui.

The UH Institute for Astronomy is proposing to establish and operate a PLANETS telescope facility located within the Haleakalā High Altitude Observatory Site.