Maui Workforce Development and Engineering Technology Program The National Science Foundation has announced that it is awarding a five-year, $2.8 million grant to the University of Hawai‘i Institute for Astronomy to support the Akamai Workforce Initiative (AWI) to prepare Hawai‘i college students for science and technology jobs available on Maui and across the state of Hawai‘i, with an emphasis on jobs related to astronomy, remote sensing, and instrumentation. The grant will continue the established partnership

Na Kilo HokuTHE ONES WHO LOOK TO THE STARS

No. 32 • 2009IN

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A Newsletter from theInstitute for AstronomyUniversity of Hawai‘i

What’s Inside UH Manoa IYA 2009 Exhibit 30 Meter Telescope pg 3

Grad Program Milestone pg 4

LCROSS Update pg 5

Kuiper Prize pg 6

Friends: Eclipse ExpeditionUpcoming Events pg 7

From the Director pg 8

SMA Uncovers Progenitors of Planetary Systems, Massive Stars

The Submillimeter Array (SMA) on Mauna Kea consists of eight movable antennas, each six meters in diameter. They are used to detect radiation with wavelengths from 0.3 to 1.7 millimeters (0.01 to 0.07 inches), which is on the short end of the radio spectrum. The main source of this radiation is cold interstellar material—gas, dust, and small rocks. Unlike telescopes that detect radiation in the shorter visible and infrared wavelengths, the SMA allows scientists to look into dense interstellar clouds and to witness the birth of stars and planetary systems.

IfA scientists have used the SMA to make pioneering discoveries. Doctoral student Rita Mann and her faculty advisor, Jonathan Williams, found a binary star-disk system in which each star is surrounded by the kind of dust disk that is frequently the precursor of a planetary system. In a separate project, SMA Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Swift found a massive, quiescent object in a dark cloud that is probably the direct progenitor of a massive star or stars.

The binary system discovered by Mann and Williams stands out as the first known example of two optically visible stars, each surrounded by a disk with enough mass to form a planetary system like our own. It lies 1,300 light-years from Earth, in the famous Orion Nebula, the kind of rich cluster of stars that is a common birth environment for most stars in our Milky Way galaxy, including our Sun.

A binary star system consists of two stars bound together by gravity that orbit a common center of gravity. Most stars form as binaries, and if both stars are hospitable to planet formation, it increases the likelihood that scientists will discover Earth-like planets. Please see SMA, pg 2

between the Institute for Astronomy, the Center for Adaptive Optics, and Maui Community College.

AWI will include paid high-technology summer internships, new courses in engineering technology at MCC, outreach to high schools, and a program that helps scientists and engineers become better educators. The precursor to AWI, the Akamai program, has enticed more than 80 percent of its students over the last decade to Please see Maui Akamai, pg 6

A color composite mid-infrared image of the infrared dark cloud overlaid with gray contours that trace the mass in the dark cloud at low resolution. The orange contours represent the emission detected by the SMA that is dominated by the massive, cold core near the center of mass of the cloud. The Oort cloud of comet nuclei is the outermost part of our solar system. Its radius is about 100,000 times the distance from the Sun to Earth. J. Swift, NASA/JPL-Caltech/E. Churchwell (Univ. of Wisconsin) and James Clerk Maxwell Telescope/ Joint Astronomy Centre.

visible only through telescopes, but they would be within reach of spacecraft from a civilization with the same level of technology as ours.

The larger disk is the most massive found in the Orion Nebula so far. The discovery of this massive disk and the binary disk system improve our understanding of how common planet formation is in our Galaxy and place our solar system in context.

Swift’s discovery may be the first time that scientists have been able to see such a region before massive stars form. Located 23,000 light-years from us, it has a mass 120 times that of the Sun contained within a volume smaller than the Oort cloud of comets orbiting at the edge of our solar system. Its temperature is less than 18 degrees above absolute zero (–273° C or –460° F). Such a large amount of cold dense gas is likely to evolve into one or more massive stars.

Massive stars—those with a mass of more than eight times that of the Sun—are much rarer than Sun-like stars. However, they produce disproportion-ately more radiation, causing them to lead short, spectacular lives. The rarity of massive stars and their propensity to quickly destroy the environments from which they form has posed a serious challenge to understanding their formation.

“The SMA is a unique instrument in a superb location that facilitates our ability to map the conditions preceding the formation of massive stars with high resolution. Perhaps the most exciting thing is that we now know that massive and dense cores with no sign of star formation activity do exist,” said Swift, noting that further study is necessary.

Left: SMA image of the binary system. The mass of the disk on the left is 70 times the mass of Jupiter, while the one on the right is 20 Jupiter masses. University of Hawai‘i. Right: The optical image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the shadow of the large disk, but the smaller disk is obscured in the glare of the brighter star. Courtesy Nathan Smith, University of California at Berkeley.

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One of the disks was discovered in an image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, but the other disk was hidden in the glare of the star. Hubble saw only the disk shadow, so the amount of material and its capability for planet formation was unknown until the IfA team made the SMA observations. “The SMA was able to image the binary system at almost the same level of detail as the Hubble Space Telescope, but in the extreme infrared, where we can see the glow from the dust, rather than its shadow,” explained Mann.

The two stars would take 4,500 years to complete one orbit around their common center. Both stars are only about a third the mass of our Sun and are much cooler and redder in color. Viewed from a potential future planet, the stellar neighbor would appear as an intense point in the night sky, about one thousand times brighter than the brightest star in our night sky, Sirius. Planets around the other star would be

The SMA, a joint project of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, detects light at wavelengths where the coldest objects in the cosmos glow brightest. By employing a technology called interferometry, in which signals from two or more small antennas are combined, the SMA produces images of unparalleled resolution at these wavelengths. Photo by Jonathan Weintroub, SMA.

www.cfa.harvard.edu/sma/

Before construction can begin on Mauna Kea, the TMT must apply for and receive a Conservation District Use Permit from the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. This will be done through the community-based Office of Mauna Kea Management, which oversees the Mauna Kea summit as part of the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo.

The TMT project is an international partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and ACURA, an organiza-tion of Canadian universities. The National Astro-nomical Observatory of Japan joined TMT as a Collaborating Institution in 2008. As with the other telescopes on Mauna Kea, UH astronomers will be guaranteed a certain percentage of the observing time.

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On July 21, the TMT Observatory Corporation announced that its board of directors has selected Mauna Kea as the preferred site for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). Building on the success of the 10-meter twin Keck telescopes (now the world’s largest), the 30-meter primary mirror will be composed of 492 segments. This will give TMT nine times the collecting area of today’s largest optical telescopes. IfA Director Rolf Kudritzki said after the announcement that this will ensure that “UH will keep leadership in astronomy for at least the next 50 years.”

Scheduled for completion in 2018, the TMT will enable astronomers to detect and study light from the earliest stars and galaxies and test many of the fundamental laws of physics. To achieve these outstanding results, the TMT will integrate the latest innovations in precision control, segmented mirror design, and adaptive optics to correct for the blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere, enabling the TMT to study the Universe as clearly as if the telescope were in space.

IfA astronomer Mike Liu is looking forward to using the TMT. He said, “Thanks to its large mirror and advanced adaptive optics system, TMT will provide the sharpest images ever obtained of planets around other stars. This will allow us to observe them in the process of forming and to measure their temperatures and compositions. Such measurements will tell us how our own solar system formed and if similar systems are common throughout the Galaxy.”

Thirty Meter Telescope Selects Mauna Kea by Louise Good

http://library.manoa.hawaii.edu/about/exhibits/bridge_2009.html

Hamilton Library Hosts IYA 2009 ExhibitThe IfA and Hamilton Library are presenting the exhibit “The Universe: Yours to Discover” in the Hamilton Bridge Gallery through mid-December in celebration of the International Year of Astronomy, a global event to encourage all people to rediscover their place in the Universe by viewing the night sky.

All of the images in this exhibit are from Hawai‘i. Featured are celestial images taken with the 340-million-pixel MegaCam on the Canada-France- Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea by CFHT astronomer Jean-Charles Cuillandre. IfA graphic artist Karen Teramura created the other works in the exhibit, including a stunning photomontage entitled “Hawai‘i: Our Portal to the Cosmos.”

Rare books from the Hamilton Library’s Special Research Collection and tools used by amateur astronomers round out the exhibit.

A series of lectures by UH astronomers accompanies the exhibit. See “Upcoming Events” on page 7 of this newsletter for more information.P

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The TMT will integrate the latest innovations in precision control, segmented mirror design, and adaptive optics to correct for the blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere, enabling the TMT to study the Universe as clearly as if the telescope were in space. Courtesy TMT Observatory Corporation.

about 50 percent, and included studies of some of the most distant objects ever discovered. This reflects the larger telescopes and improved instrumentation over the years.

Another important change in the astronomy graduate program over the last 35 years has been the increased foreign enrollment. The first 50 students in the program were all from the United States, except for a Canadian or two, but in recent years the program has been greatly enriched by students from Asia (Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Yemen, Dubai, Lebanon) and Europe (UK, Ireland, France, Portugal, Denmark, Romania), as well as Mexico.

Still another positive trend is the increasing number of women PhD graduates. Though it is true that three of our first six PhD recipients were women, the fraction of female astronomy graduate students hovered around 20–25 percent for much of the seventies and eighties. The program started to become more balanced around 1989, a year in which five of the seven incoming students were women. In recent years, about 40 percent of the astronomy PhDs awarded to Hawai‘i graduate students have gone to women.

Gareth Wynn-Williams has been an IfA astronomer since 1978, and served several terms as chair of the Astronomy Graduate Program.4

On May 27, Nick Moskovitz became the 100th graduate student at the IfA to successfully defend his PhD dissertation, which was entitled “Thermal Histories of Small Bodies in the Solar System.” Since then, Jeyhan Kartaltepe (“A Multiwavelength Study of (Ultra) luminous Infrared Galaxies in the COSMOS Field”), Bin Yang (“Water in Primitive Solar System Bodies”), and Joseph Masiero (“Light Curve Signatures of the Physical Properties of Small Asteroids”) have all followed suit.

The Astronomy Graduate Program formally split off from the Physics Graduate Program in 1972. Three years later, its first PhDs were awarded to Terry Martin, who subsequently played a major role in JPL’s Mars exploration program, Nancy Morrison, currently director of the Ritter Observatory in Ohio, and Catherine Pilachowski, who was president of the American Astronomical Society from 2003 to 2004.

What can we learn from the alumni page on the IfA website? Three interesting trends can be discerned.

First, there has been a strong shift in the subject matter of the dissertations. Only two of the first ten astronomy PhDs were awarded for extragalactic work (studies of objects outside our Milky Way galaxy), and in both cases the galaxies studied were among the closest to our own. In recent years, however, the fraction of extragalactic dissertations has leapt to

Astronomy Graduate Program Reaches Milestoneby Gareth Wynn-Williams

Nick MoskovitzJeyhan KartaltepeBin Yang

IfA students celebrated with Joe Masiero after he successfully defendedhis dissertation.

the Haleakala Amateur Astronomers (HAA) will observe the LCROSS impact both visually and using 14- and 18-inch telescopes with cameras attached. One of their cameras was obtained with the help of Ritter and IfA Education and Outreach Specialist Dr. J. D. Armstrong. They worked with Kalama Interme-diate School Vice Principal Penrod Valdyka (an HAA member) to write a grant submitted to the state Department of Education. Students from that school will have the opportunity to learn by analyzing the images taken by the camera. IfA staff on Hawai‘i island are also working with amateur astronomers who will observe the impact.

The LCROSS mission was launched on June 18, along with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, from Cape Canaveral, Florida. For more information about the LCROSS mission and images of Cabeus A, visit www.nasa.gov/lcross.

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NASA has selected a final destination for its Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) after a journey of nearly 5.6 million miles that included several orbits around Earth and the Moon. The mission team announced September 9 that Cabeus A will be the target crater for the LCROSS dual impacts scheduled for 1:30 a.m. HST on October 9, 2009. After an extensive review, the crater was selected as the optimal location for the spacecraft’s evaluation of whether water ice exists at the lunar south pole.

LCROSS will search for water ice by sending its spent upper-stage Centaur rocket to impact the permanently shadowed polar crater. The satellite will fly into the plume of dust left by the impact and measure the properties before also colliding with the lunar surface. The LCROSS team selected Cabeus A based on a set of conditions that include proper debris plume illumination for visibility from Earth, a high concentration of hydrogen, and mature crater features such as a flat floor, gentle slopes, and the absence of large boulders.

Professional astronomers will observe the impact with both ground-based telescopes and with telescopes in space, including the newly refurbished Hubble Space Telescope and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At Mauna Kea Observatories on the island of Hawai‘i, the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility, W. M. Keck Observatory, and the UH 2.2-meter telescope will be among those observing the impact.

On Maui, IfA scientists and staff have joined with staff at Las Cumbres Observatory, which operates the 2-meter Faulkes Telescope North on Haleakala, to conduct a unique experiment. They will use a technique called polarization modulation to virtually eliminate water in Earth’s atmosphere from the observations, and then by looking at the resulting light through filters that limit the light to specific wavelengths, they hope to detect water (H2O) that has been photolyzed, that is broken up into hydrogen and hydroxyl ions (H and OH–) components by light. IfA scientists will also be observing the impact with the IfA-designed and -built HiVis spectropolarimeter on the 3.6-meter AEOS telescope. “With smaller telescopes, we may have greater sensitivity than larger ground-based observatories because of our use of novel polarimetry techniques,” said Dr. Joe Ritter, director of the IfA Advanced Technology Research Center Laboratory.

Amateur astronomers will also play an important role in chronicling the impact and its aftermath. On Maui, at a site at the 9,955-foot (3,034-m) elevation,

LCROSS Update: Target Crater Selected for Lunar South Pole Impacts

In this artist’s concept, LCROSS observes the impact of its booster into the lunar pole, just before it also crashes. Credit: NASA

http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov

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Haleakala Amateur Astronomers (HAA) will observe the LCROSS impact from this site on Haleakala.

Maui Akamai from pg 1

remain in technology jobs or continue their education. All students in the Akamai program have ties to Hawai‘i, 80 percent were either born in Hawai‘i or graduated from a Hawai‘i high school, and about 25 percent of them are Native Hawaiian.

The grant will enable the AWI to build on a program that has been developed during the last decade through funding by the NSF Center for Adaptive Optics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) in partner-ship with the IfA, MCC, the Air Force, the Maui Economic Development Board, local Maui industry partners, and Mauna Kea Observatories on Hawai‘i. In addition to the NSF, the UH, the Air Force, and the TMT Observatory Corporation have also been major contributors to the program. The training program integrates the technical and research expertise of faculty and graduate students from the IfA with practi-cal high-tech work experience.

The MCC Engineering Technology program will be developed collaboratively with the IfA and the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE) at UCSC, will include cutting-edge technology, and will engage local scientists and engineers in formulating and teaching the curriculum. The curriculum will include a strong emphasis on problem solving, communication, team- work, and other professional skills that will ensure students are successful when they enter the workforce. It will build on the unique strengths and needs of the Maui community, and attract and retain students from a broader range of backgrounds than is currently present in tech fields.

The grant’s principal investigator, Lisa Hunter, is director of the ISEE at UCSC and director of the AWI at IfA Maui. Hunter stated, “After many years of working with community partners, the tech industry on Maui, and observatories on Hawai‘i Island to identify skills and knowledge needed to succeed in the workforce, we are now positioned to help create an innovative, culturally relevant Engineering Technology Program at MCC that will become a long-term pathway for local students to get tech jobs in Hawai‘i.”

IfA Associate Director for Maui Jeff Kuhn said, “With MCC, the Institute for Astronomy is committed to improving technology education on Maui. It’s just the right thing to do, and is our shortest path to a self-sufficient future on this island.” MCC Engineering Technology Director Mark Hoffman added, “Our program will have an enormous effect on MCC engineering technology students, who have traditionally been major participants in the AWI program, and are now working in tech jobs on Maui.”

ISEE prepares science and engineering graduate students for their educational role as future faculty members and a wide range of other science and engineering careers requiring teaching skills. It is based on a decade of educational projects originated by the Center for Adaptive Optics at UCSC.

www.ifa.hawaii.edu/haleakalanew/akamai/6

Solar astronomer Don Mickey (on chair) explains the tech-nology used at Mees Solar Observatory to Akamai participants.

Tobias Owen

Owen Receives Kuiper Prize and NASA Medal IfA faculty member Tobias Owen has been awarded the 2009 Gerard P. Kuiper Prize by the Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) to recognize and honor his outstanding contributions to planetary science. He also received the NASA Medal for Exceptional Public Service in June.

Owen has been at IfA for 19 years. He has been involved in many of NASA’s major planetary missions over the past 40 years, including the ongoing Cassini-Huygens mission to the Saturn system. Owen was the American lead on a joint ESA-NASA team that developed this international mission and brought it to a new start in 1989. He is currently analyzing results from this remarkably successful Saturn Orbiter plus the Titan probe. Owen’s scientific achievements include the discovery of the rings of Jupiter and noble (inert) gases and heavy water on Mars, deducing the early existence of a new class of solar system building blocks called “solar composition icy planetesimals,” and establishing the importance of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) and other isotopes for studying the history and formation mechanisms of our solar system.

Owen is a coauthor of two undergraduate textbooks, The Planetary System and The Search for Life in the Universe, both now in their third editions. He has also authored over 300 scientific articles.

Founded in 1968 by a committee organized by Owen, Joseph Chamberlain, and Carl Sagan, the DPS is the subdivision of the AAS that focuses on solar system research.

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Please check with the sponsoring organization for specific times and locations for all events.

O‘ahu Events: call (808) 956-8566 www.ifa.hawaii.edu/specialevents/

Wednesday, November 18, Frontiers of Astronomy Community Lecture: “The Magic of a Disappearing Sun,” IfA astronomer Shadia Habbal, UH Manoa Art Building auditorium, 7:30 p.m. Free.

IYA 2009 Lecture Series, 3:30 p.m. UH Manoa Campus Hamilton Library, room 301, free.:

Wednesday, October 14, “The Antikythera Mechanism, ” IfA astronomer Gareth Wynn-Williams.

Wednesday, October 28, “Telescopes: Big and Small,” IfA astronomer Alan T. Tokunaga, division chief for the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea and IfA associate director for instrumentation.

Wednesday, November 18, “Sacred Mountains and Astronomy,” IfA astronomer Paul H. Coleman.

Thursday, December 3, “Hubble Space Telescope: Past, Present & Future,” IfA astronomer Lisa Kewley.

Maui Events: call (808) 573-9516

Maui Maikalani Community Lecture:

Friday, October 16, “Exploring the Micro World,” Dr. Gary Greenberg, Micro-scopy & Microanalysis Laboratory, IfA. Maikalani Advanced Technology Research Center, 34 Ohia Ku Street, Pukalani, 6:30 p.m. Free.

Hawai‘i Island Events: (808) 932-2328 or fujihara@ifa.hawaii.edu

Saturday, October 24, Galileo Block Party at North A‘ohoku Place, Hilo: 1:30–7:00 p.m.

http://www.naoj.org/IYA/Blockparty/

Directors Lecture Series:

October 15 & 17 and November 19 & 21 For details see:

http://www.mkooc.org/IYA/#Directors

A Solar Eclipse on Enewetak by Beverly Lynn-WilsonThe diamond ring flashed. In an instant, the Moon covered the Sun and extinguished the light. I nearly shouted when I realized I was seeing my first total solar eclipse, after two attempts that failed due to bad weather. But I remained quiet because the IfA Eclipse Team I accompanied to Enewetak in the Marshall Islands needed to concentrate on gathering data. The team was led by IfA astronomer Shadia Habbal.

After waiting for an imperceptibly slow-moving Moon to eat away the Sun, darkness came so quickly that my brain barely had time to register what I had seen: tiny blips of light called Bailey’s Beads forming a narrow band encircling the Sun, and then a last handful of sunlight glowing like a diamond.

Darkness descended on July 22 at 3:28 p.m. For five minutes and 40 seconds, it wasn’t daytime, but neither did it look entirely like night. A yellow-white Venus shimmered low in the western sky, and a few stars appeared, but the sky was not the right shade of blue for twilight. This sky had more royal mixed in with the indigo, making it brighter. Under the blue, along the western horizon, the sky was an orangey-yellow. The ocean I was looking over, on the other hand, changed from royal blue to the usual twilight indigo, as if somehow the world had turned upside down.

In contrast to the soft colors and sharp shadows around me, the Sun looked starkly black with the silvery white lion’s mane of the corona now visible. The Sun is so bright that you can see its outer atmosphere (corona) only during a total eclipse.

Totality is the best time for scientists to study the corona, especially in regions close to the Sun. We know remarkably little about this nuclear reactor that makes life possible on Earth. Particles streaming out from the Sun can disrupt communications and GPS devices here on Earth, cause power surges, and put astronauts at risk. The more we learn, the more we can ameliorate these disruptions and risks.

During this eclipse, the scientists collected data about ions of iron and helium. They took spectra to obtain infrared data. Technology has only recently become advanced enough to study the corona in the infrared, so we have very little data so far in that area.

The data collection involved months of planning, weeks of instrument calibration, and several practice sessions. Everything had to proceed flawlessly on eclipse day, since scientists had only minutes and no second chances. The data will take weeks or months to analyze. Added to data from previous and future eclipses, scientists are slowly filling in missing pieces of the puzzle that is the corona.

As suddenly as totality began, a tiny globule of Sun reappeared, as if someone had flipped on a switch, and the light returned. The globule grew to a thin crescent and then a fat crescent, looking like phases of the Moon. In an hour and 20 minutes the entire Sun was back.

http://iyahawaii.blogspot.com/2009/08/eclipse-trip.html

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IfA Eclipse Team members posed in front of the main observing tent on Enewtak. Beverly Lynn-Wilson, an active member of the Friends of the IfA, is in the front row (light tan blouse).

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UH Institute for Astronomy2680 Woodlawn DriveHonolulu, HI 96822-1897

Na Kilo Hoku“The Ones Who Look to the Stars”

No. 32 • 2009Published by

The University of Hawai‘i

Institute for Astronomy

Rolf-Peter Kudritzki IfA Director

Louise H. Good Editor

Karen Teramura Design/Production

Education & Outreach

Gary Fujihara, Island of Hawai‘i

Mary Kadooka, O‘ahu, all islands

J. D. Armstrong, Maui

2680 Woodlawn Drive

Honolulu, Hawai‘i 96822

telephone (808) 956-8566

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/

Na Kilo Hoku is also online:www2.ifa.hawaii.edu/newsletters/

The year 2009 has been an extraordinarily successful one for the IfA! Four hundred years after Galileo made

the first scientific study of the sky with a telescope—a cultural and scientific milestone that changed the

thinking of humans in a fundamental way—two new revolutionary telescope projects will move forward in

Hawai‘i, the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) on Haleakala and the Thirty Meter Telescope

(TMT) on Mauna Kea.

While the decision to select Haleakala as the site for the ATST was made some time ago, the exciting

news about the TMT arrived in July (see article on page 3). The TMT will be the largest telescope ever in the

long and exciting history of astronomy. It will allow for breathtaking new science, including the direct

imaging of planets orbiting other stars and the spectral analysis of their chemical composition, and the

investigation of the most distant building blocks of galaxies in the cosmos that will give us insights into

how the Universe evolved from a time when it was still very young.

The TMT will be a milestone for astronomy in Hawai‘i, but it is also a major step forward for the

University of Hawai‘i and the state. The TMT is a billion dollar project that will bring tremendous

opportunities in education, training, workforce development, and of course, science. We worked hard to

make this happen. Thus, it was not a surprise that the spontaneous party at the IfA was loud and wild after

the decision to select Hawai‘i.

Dear Friends of the Institute for Astronomy,

Photo by Rainer Arlt/AIP,

Astronomischen Gesellschaft 2009, Potsdam

IfA Director Rolf-Peter Kudritzki received the Karl Schwarzschild Prize from Ralph-Juergen Dettmar, president of the Astronomische Gesellschaft (German Astronomical Society) on September 22 at the society’s annual meeting in Potsdam, Germany. The award is the most prestigious award bestowed upon an astronomer in Germany.