Word: light
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...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...
...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 Ghez...
...only thing that reasonably fits this description is a black hole, an object whose gravity is so strong even light can't escape from it. "We have evidence of these supermassive black holes in several other galaxies," says Ghez, "but this is the most convincing case we know...
...science than the newer telescopes, but the newcomers haven't wasted any time catching up. The European Southern Observatory's VLT, for example, built and operated by a consortium of eight countries, got the first of its four 8.2-m telescopes up and running in 1998 and achieved "first light" with the fourth in September...
...fact, whereas the Europeans started later than their American competitors, they could pull ahead before too long. Not only do they have four giant telescopes on one site, but they've also budgeted more money than anyone else for state-of-the-art light detectors...