Tag: astronomy

LISA Pathfinder cubes in freefall

8:38 pm

After a week of testing scientists have now completely released LISA Pathfinder’s two gold-platinum cubes so that they are floating free within the spacecraft.

With the cubes released, the spacecraft is now measuring the position of each cube and using thrusters to adjust its position and keep the cubes floating within it. This success has essentially proven that the technology works, though they now have to see if the technology can be maintained in orbit for a long enough period of time to be worthwhile. If so, this mission will be followed by multiple similar spacecraft, flying in formation while also measuring their positions precisely relative to each other. If a gravitational wave rolls past, they will detect it by the tiny differences of each cube’s position, kind of like beach balls floating on the ocean as a wave rolls past.

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India okays its own LIGO detector

4:32 pm

The Indian government today approved construction of LIGO-India, using some duplicate components already available from the American LIGO gravitational wave detector.

“We have built an exact copy of that instrument that can be used in the LIGO-India Observatory,” says David Shoemaker, leader of the Advanced LIGO Project and director of the MIT LIGO Lab, “ensuring that the new detector can both quickly come up to speed and match the U.S. detector performance.” LIGO will provide Indian researchers with the components and training to build and run the new Advanced LIGO detector, which will then be operated by the Indian team.

What this new instrument will accomplish is to give astronomers more information when a gravitational wave rolls past the Earth. By having detectors half a world apart, they will be able to better triangulate the direction the wave came from, which in turn will help astronomers eventually pinpoint its source event.

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Hubble measures the rotation of an exoplanet

3:03 pm

Worlds without end: Using the Hubble Space Telescope astronomers have measured the daily rotation of a super Jupiter exoplanet 170 light years away.

They estimate, based upon brightness variations attributed to clouds in the upper atmosphere, that the rotation rate is about 10 hours long. We should all recognize however the significant uncertainty of this number. Clouds change, as do weather conditions. The data only gives us a hint at what is going on here.

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Astronomers make first analysis of a SuperEarth’s atmosphere.

9:32 am

Worlds without end: Using the Hubble Space Telescopes astronomers have made the first chemical analysis of a SuperEarth’s atmosphere.

The planet, 55 Cancri e, is estimated to have a mass of eight Earths. Its atmosphere was found to have hydrogen, helium, and the molecule hydrogen cyanide. No water was detected.

Astronomers have used Hubble to detect the components of a number of exoplanets, but these have all been giant planets more like Jupiter. This is the first measurement of an exoplanet whose mass is small enough that it might be rocky, like Earth.

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TMT might abandon Hawaii

9:10 pm

The consortium building the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) decided last week that, because of the delays forced on them by protesters in Hawaii, they are going to start identifying alternative locations.

I don’t think they have a choice. They want to start construction no later than 2018, which already involves a three year delay from their original schedule and significant additional costs. I doubt there is any chance that the permit process, which took years the first time they did it, can take anywhere close to that.

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TMT to repeat hearings before state

9:27 pm

After years of doing everything the state of Hawaii demanded in order to get permission to build the Thirty Meter Telescope, a state judge today ordered that the whole process should start over again.

Since this order was instigated by the protesters, and that it appears the government favors those protesters, I expect that there is no chance TMT will ever get approval to build in Hawaii. Though the university consortium building the telescope says they want to go through the new process to get permission, they are wasting their time. It will never happen. The peasants with the pitchforks and burning torches, terrified of new knowledge while preferring the worship of a mountain, are in control in Hawaii.

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Hawaii’s governor expresses empty support for TMT

7:04 am

The coming dark age: In his state of the state address on Monday the Democratic governor of Hawaii, David Ige, expressed weak support for the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna Kea.

“In its recent ruling, the Supreme Court did not say don’t do this project,” Governor Ige said. “What it did say was that the state didn’t do the right things in the approval process.  It told us we needed to do a better job of listening to people and giving them a real opportunity to be heard.

“I am committed to pursuing this project and I hope its sponsors will stay with us.  And this time, we will listen carefully to all, reflect seriously on what we have heard and, whatever we do in the end, we will do it the right way.”

These are empty words. Listening to the protesters means the telescope doesn’t get built at all. The protesters made it very clear during their protesters this past year that their’ objective is to stop the telescope, to return to the illiterate native culture that existed before the arrival of the white man and his western civilization. They also made it clear that they are bigots, who want all not-native Hawaiians removed from the island. By saying he wants to “do a better job of listening” to them means that Ige is willing to go along with some of their ideas.

Right now, I am very doubtful TMT will ever get built on Mauna Kea.

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Comet 67P/C-G’s active surface

9:28 am

Comet 67P/C-G's active surface

Cool image time! The Rosetta science team today released a spectacular image, taken by Rosetta’s high resolution camera, of the surface of Comet 67P/C-G. A cropped version is above and below the fold. A cropped version of the full image, focusing in on the smooth and active area dubbed Imhotep, is above.

This smooth dusty terrain, which covers about 0.8 sq km, is etched with curvilinear features stretching hundreds of metres and which have been found to change in appearance over time. Many large boulders are also seen scattered within the smooth terrain, including the boulder Cheops in the foreground. Smaller but more numerous boulders are associated with exposed cliff faces and are most likely the product of erosion. In some debris falls, detailed analysis has revealed the presence of water ice.

I have also included, below the fold, a second close-up crop from this same image, showing the layered cliffs to the left of Imhotep as well as several mysterious as-yet not understood round features at the cliff’s base.
» Read more

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Thirty Meter Telescope’s future in Hawaii in state’s hands

8:54 am

The coming dark age: The executive director of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Friday made it clear that the future of the project in Hawaii is waiting on the state government.

Ed Stone, the project’s executive director, said telescope officials don’t have enough information to decide. “We’re waiting now for the instructions from the courts through the Department of Land and Natural Resources … which they can convey to us what this new process needs to be, what the schedule is and then we can take it into account in deciding what we do next,” he said. “So we can’t really do anything until we have an idea what it is the state’s requiring to see if that’s going to be consistent with what we can do.”

State officials are not holding up the process, state Attorney General Doug Chin said in a statement. “On Dec. 29, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the circuit court to further remand to the Board of Land and Natural Resources so that a contested case hearing can be conducted,” he said. “As of today, the circuit court has not remanded the case. BLNR cannot take action or provide instructions to anyone until this happens.”

The excuse of Hawaii’s attorney general above is garbage. If the governor pushed, he could get the court to move. They are instead allowing the case to languish, which once again tells us that the sympathies of this liberal Democratic Party government lie entirely on the side of the protesters.

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Most powerful supernovae ever

6:56 pm

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered the most powerful supernovae ever detected.

This one, called ASASSN-15lh, is about 3.8 billion light years away, 200 times more powerful than most supernovas, and twice as bright as the previous record holder. It shines 20 times brighter than the combined output of the Milky Way’s 100 billion stars, and in the last six months, it has spewed as much energy as the sun would in 10 lifetimes, says Krzysztof Stanek of the Ohio State University, co-principal investigator of the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN) network that spotted the explosion. “This is really on steroids, and then some,” he says. “If it was in our own galaxy, it would shine brighter than the full moon; there would be no night, and it would be easily seen during the day.”

At the moment astronomers don’t really have an theory to explain how the supernovae could produce that much energy.

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Was the Wow! signal from two comets?

10:35 pm

One of the most baffling radio astronomical detections, dubbed the “Wow! signal” and that some believe could have been caused by an extraterrestrial transmission, is now theorized to have been caused by two comets, not an alien civilization.

Antonio Paris, a professor of astronomy at St Petersburg College in Florida, thinks the signal might have come from one or more passing comets. He points the finger at two suspects, called 266P/Christensen and P/2008 Y2 (Gibbs). “I came across the idea when I was in my car driving and wondered if a planetary body, moving fast enough, could be the source,” he says.

Comets release a lot of hydrogen as they swing around the sun. This happens because ultraviolet light breaks up their frozen water, creating a cloud of the gas extending millions of kilometres out from the comet itself. If the comets were passing in front of the Big Ear in 1977, they would have generated an apparently short-lived signal, as the telescope (now dismantled) had a fixed field of view. Searching that same area – as subsequent radio telescopes did – wouldn’t show anything. Tracing the comets’ positions back in time, Paris says that the possible origin for the Wow! signal falls right between where they would have been.

Neither comet was known in 1977; they were both discovered in the last decade, which would mean nobody would have thought to search for them.

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Betelgeuse baffles astronomers

9:10 am

The uncertainty of science: New data of the red giant star Betelgeuse says that the star simply doesn’t have the energy to eject the large amount of gas it routinely blows into space.

“[W]e now have a problem”, says Graham Harper, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “If you’re going to eject matter you have to put energy in, and we’re not seeing that.” Harper and his colleagues used the US–German Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA), a 2.5-metre telescope that flies in a modified Boeing 747 aeroplane, to take Betelgeuse’s temperature. They found that the star’s upper atmosphere was much cooler than expected — so cool, in fact, that it doesn’t seem to have enough energy to kick gas out of its gravitational pull and into space.

“This challenges all our theoretical models,” Harper said on 7 January at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Kissimmee, Florida. [emphasis mine]

The data suggests the temperature of the ejected gas to be only about 512 degrees Fahrenheit. This is far too cool to fit any theory for explaining the vast amounts of gas that the star routinely puffs into space. It also suggests, not surprisingly, that scientists do not yet have a enough information to develop a clear understanding of stellar evolution. They have enough information to form rough theories, but there is still much too much they do not know.

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Astronomers successfully predict appearance of supernova

11:35 pm

For the first time ever astronomers have been able to predict and photograph the appearance of a supernova, its light focused by the gravitational lensing caused by a galaxy and the dark matter that surrounds it.

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured the image of the first-ever predicted supernova explosion. The reappearance of the Refsdal supernova was calculated from different models of the galaxy cluster whose immense gravity is warping the supernova’s light.

What makes this significant is that the prediction models were based on the theory of gravitational lensing and required the presence of dark matter to work. That they worked and were successful in predicting the appearance of this gravitationally bent light (bent by the dark matter it passed through) is a very strong confirmation of both concepts. Up until now I have been somewhat skeptical of gravitational lensing. This confirmation removes some of that skepticism.

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Builders of TMT begin removing equipment

11:23 pm

The coming dark age: The builders of the Thirty Meter Telescope today began removing construction equipment from the summit of Mauna Kea.

After the Dec. 2 court ruling voiding the permit, the state attorney general’s office said telescope equipment could remain on the mountain. The court sent the matter back for a new contested-case hearing. Telescope officials haven’t indicated whether they will pursue a new hearing, which could mean a construction delay of several years. [emphasis mine]

Essentially, even if the new permitting process approves the telescope, it will be a very long time before they can begin construction. And approval is certainly not guaranteed, considering the anti-white, anti-technology, and anti-civilization attitude that is clearly growing in Hawaii. I suspect that the builders of TMT are planning to get out, and not come back.

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Hawaii’s Supreme Court kills TMT

8:53 am

The coming dark age: As I expected the Hawaiian Supreme Court today ruled that the construction permit given to the builders of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is invalid, putting all construction on Mauna Kea on hold indefinitely.

It is very clear that the very liberal government of Hawaii is on the side of the protesters and is doing what it can to stop construction. Will the builders of TMT recognize this and try to find a new site for the telescope, or will they continue the legal battle to build it in Hawaii? I think they stand no chance of winning in Hawaii, but they might not have any other choice.

I also ask: What about the decisions to decommission other telescopes to make room for TMT? Do those telescopes still get removed, even if TMT isn’t built?

All in all, this decision probably puts an end to new cutting-edge science in Hawaii. Like the Catholic Church’s attack on Galileo (which essentially killed the Renaissance in Italy), astronomers, and in fact all scientists, will likely go elsewhere now to find a friendly haven for the search for knowledge.

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A developing new astronomical mystery

8:58 am

Radio astronomers in Australia have recently detected a number of new mysterious radio bursts, dubbed fast radio bursts because of their nature, coming from outside our galaxy whose cause presently has no clear explanation.

An unprecedented double burst recently showed up along with four more of these flashes, researchers report online November 25 at arXiv.org.

Fast radio bursts, first detected in 2007, are bright blasts of radio energy that last for just a few milliseconds and are never seen again. Until now, astronomers had cataloged nine bursts that appeared to originate well outside the Milky Way. Yet, follow-up searches with nonradio telescopes for anything that might be pulsing or exploding keep coming up empty.

This mystery is similar to that of gamma ray bursts (GRBs), which were first discovered in the 1960s. About once a day there would be a short burst of gamma ray energy coming from scattered random directions in the sky, but no other radiation in any other wavelength. For decades astronomers didn’t know if the GRBs were coming from just outside our atmosphere or from billions of light years away. Finally, in the 1990s they pinned their location to the deaths of stars in distant other galaxies. As noted by one scientist at a conference, “GRBs signal the daily formation of a new black hole.”

Fast radio bursts are more intriguing. Because of their wavelengths and random locations on the sky, astronomers seem confident that they are occurring outside the Milky Way. However, in the eight years since their discovery only a handful have been detected, making it extremely difficult to study them. Nonetheless, they are significant because they signal some cataclysmic event far away, likely the death of a star in a way not yet understood or predicted. Finding out what that event is will produce important information about the evolution of our universe.

It just might take decades for this new mystery to be solved. Stay tuned!

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Hawaii’s Supreme Court temporarily stops TMT

9:13 am

With the possibility of a new confrontation on Mauna Kea between protesters and the builders of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), Hawaii’s Supreme Court on Tuesday placed a temporary stay on all work until December 2..

Earlier in the week, Thirty Meter Telescope opponents were preparing to face off Wednesday against hundreds of law enforcement officers. But hours before the anticipated showdown, state Department of Land and Natural Resources agents who were scheduled to be on Mauna Kea to ensure TMT crews safe, unobstructed access to the construction site were told to stand down after the state Supreme Court temporarily prevented construction on the mountain until December 2.

TMT officials say they wanted for workers to complete maintenance and repairs on equipment that has sat idle since April, when construction crews were blocked by more than 750 protesters. Opponents of the project say it desecrates a sacred Native Hawaiian place.

At least two heavy-duty machines at the construction are reportedly leaking oil and fuel.

As much as these protesters claim they do not want the mountain desecrated, I believe their real goal, much like the thugs today on college campuses, is the gaining of power. The religious argument is merely a convenient tool for hiding their power grab. And even if they are sincere, their ultimate goal is still racist, as they are hostile to all non-Hawaiian natives, and wish them expunged from the islands.

Under these conditions, I do not see TMT being built on Mauna Kea. Even though the public there generally supports its construction, the public also has a naive sympathy for the protesters (Scroll down in this article to see the poll numbers).

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The first image of a newly formed exoplanet

9:45 pm

Astronomers have captured the first image, using ground-based telescopes, of an exoplanet in the process of forming.

The star is 450 light years away, and the image is really a combined image using data taken by two different telescopes, one in infrared light and the other gathering visible light spectroscopy. So, this really isn’t a photograph like you’d take with your camera, but a re-creation. Nonetheless it provides us a first look at the star and the new planet forming in orbit around it.

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Mysterious piece of space junk burns up over Indian Ocean

9:05 am

Though scientists have not yet identified it, the piece of space junk discovered last month in an unusual orbit with a predictable moment of decay has burned up over the Indian Ocean,

Estimated to measure 1–2 metres across, WT1190F had circled the Earth–Moon system since at least 2009, says independent astronomy-software developer Bill Gray, who has been working with NASA to track the debris. It most likely came off a recent lunar spacecraft, but it is not out of the question that it could have dated to the Apollo era.

In at least one case, scientists were able to image the object as it burned up. The data from this will allow them to determine its chemical composition, which in turn might help them identify it.

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Astronomers measure 5,400 mph winds on exoplanet

8:55 am

Category 5! Astronomers have for the first time measured wind speeds on an exoplanet and they are a doozy!

Discovered on the exoplanet HD 189733b, the Warwick researchers measured the velocities on the two sides of HD 189733b and found a strong wind moving at over 5400 mph blowing from its dayside to its night side. Mr Louden explains: “HD 189733b’s velocity was measured using high resolution spectroscopy of the sodium absorption featured in its atmosphere. As parts of HD 189733b’s atmosphere move towards or away from the Earth the Doppler effect changes the wavelength of this feature, which allows the velocity to be measured.”.

This exoplanet was one of the first discovered by Kepler, which means its orbit transits its sun. In this case it does so every 2.2 days, and astronomers have taken advantage of these frequent transits to study the planet’s atmosphere as the star’s light travels through it. The result is that HD 187733b is probably one of the most studied exoplanets.

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Ground-breaking for the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile

10:07 pm

Even as construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii remains stalled because of protesters, ground has now been broken in Chile for the construction of the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).

The unique design of the telescope combines seven of the largest mirrors that can be manufactured, each 8.4 meters (27 feet) across, to create a single telescope effectively 25 meters or 85 feet in diameter. The giant mirrors are being developed at the University of Arizona’s Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory. Each mirror must be polished to an accuracy of 25 nanometers or one millionth of an inch.

One giant mirror has been polished to meet its exacting specifications. Three others are being processed, and production of the additional mirrors will be started at the rate of one per year. The telescope will begin early operations with these first mirrors in 2021, and the telescope is expected to reach full operational capacity within the next decade.

Assuming TMT ever gets built, it will, unlike GMT, be made up of many small segments.

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Earth-sized exoplanet found only 39 light years away

10:01 pm

Worlds without end: Astronomers have discovered an exoplanet only slightly bigger then the Earth, and it’s only 39 light years away.

Berta-Thompson and the others estimate that GJ 1132b has a diameter of about 9,200 miles, slightly bigger than Earth. Its mass, however, is thought to be 60 percent greater than Earth’s. Its home star — GJ 1132 — is a red dwarf one-fifth the size of our sun. The planet circles every 1.6 days from just 1.4 million miles out, thus the heat wave. A slight dip in the starlight every 1.6 days was the giveaway for the observing team. “Our ultimate goal is to find a twin Earth,” said astronomer David Charbonneau of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, one of the authors, “but along the way we’ve found a twin Venus.”

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Stars in the Milky Way so old they predate it

5:00 pm

Astronomers have discovered stars inside the Milky Way that are thought to be so old that they were formed prior to the existence of the galaxy, and that the Milky Way formed around them.

The stars, found near the centre of the Milky Way, are surprisingly pure but contain material from an even earlier star, which died in an enormous explosion called a hypernova. “These pristine stars are among the oldest surviving stars in the Universe, and certainly the oldest stars we have ever seen,” said Louise Howes, lead author of the study published in the latest issue of Nature. “These stars formed before the Milky Way, and the galaxy formed around them,” said Ms Howes, a PhD student at the ANU Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Not surprisingly, the discovery challenges theories that describe the early universe.

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Two Mauna Kea protesters convicted but get minor sentences

8:29 am

Two protesters who blocked a road leading to the summit of Mauna Kea to block construction vehicles for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) have been convicted of misdeamenors and given very minor sentences.

The state requested six months’ probation, and that they stay off Mauna Kea Access Road for the period of probation. Prosecutors also requested 72 hours of community service in lieu of a $500 fine. Fujiyoshi [one of the protesters] asked for a jail sentence instead of community service, and was sentenced to five days. He will serve one day in jail, with credit for time served; six months’ probation; and was ordered to remain off the access road. Lindsey-Kaapuni [the other protester] argued against probation, and was sentenced to 100 hours of community service.

The state here has no easy solution. If it demands severe punishment the press will make the protesters martyrs. If it lets them off then the protesters will know they can protest as much as they want and face no consequences.

Right now I do not see TMT ever getting built on Mauna Kea. I also see the slow removal of the telescopes already there to be certain, given time. The protesters are in control, and they oppose this search for knowledge about the universe.

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No sign of alien civilization at distant star

9:09 pm

The uncertainty of science: Two weeks of targeted observations by the Allen Telescope Array in California have detected no clear signal of an alien civilization at the star KIC 8462852 where Kepler observations have seen variations that could possibly be caused by giant alien structures.

Two different types of radio signals were sought: (1) Narrow-band signals, of order 1 Hz in width, such as would be generated as a “hailing signal” for societies wishing to announce their presence. This is the type of signal most frequently looked for by radio SETI experiments.  (2) Broad-band signals that might be due to beamed propulsion within this star system.  If astroengineering projects are really underway in the vicinity of KIC 8462852, one might reasonably expect the presence of spacecraft to service this activity.  If these craft are propelled by intense microwave beams, some of that energy might manifest itself as broad-band radio leakage. “This is the first time we’ve used the Allen Telescope Array to look for relatively wide-band signals, a type of emission that is generally not considered in SETI searches,” said SETI Institute scientist Gerry Harp.

Analysis of the Array data show no clear evidence for either type of signal between the frequencies of 1 and 10 GHz.  This rules out omnidirectional transmitters of approximately 100 times today’s total terrestrial energy usage in the case of the narrow-band signals, and ten million times that usage for broad band emissions.

The data shows no sign of alien civilization, but it also does not eliminate the possibility. More detailed observations are required to do that.

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Recreating the changing giant starspots on a distant star

11:46 pm

Astronomers have recreated what they think is the evolution of the giant sunspots on a distant star, covering the period from 2006 to 2012.

More importantly, Künstler’s team measured the time it takes for starspots to decay and used that information to estimate properties of the star’s magnetic field. For example, the star’s activity cycle appears to last about 26 years, more than double the Sun’s 11-year cycle.

You can see a video of this recreation at the link.

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Rosetta special science issue

9:23 am

For those who want to read some interesting science papers, on Friday the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics published a special issue devoted to the results from Rosetta and Philae.

The issue includes 46 papers, many of which are open access and thus available at no cost to the general public. Many were published previously and include their press releases. These earlier results have already been posted here at BtB, but now they the results are gathered together in one place.

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Fiber optic cable damaged on Mauna Kea

8:27 am

On the same day hundreds of protesters were blocking construction vehicles from reaching the top of Mauna Kea, the fiber optic connection between the observatories on the summit malfunctioned. Workers have now discovered that the malfunction was caused by a damaged cable that police are now investigating.

The report does not provide any real details, so this failure could be quite innocent. That police are now investigating it and that it took place on the same day as the protests however suggests that it was sabotage.

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