CFHT News Regarding Earthquake Damage

As you might know, Hawaii was hit by an important earthquake on Sunday, October 15. In fact three consecutive earthquakes of magnitude 6.6, 5.8 and 4.2, all centered on a few miles off the Kona coast, hit the Big Island and the other islands. The good news is that nobody in the CFHT staff and their families were injured. The bad news is that our headquarters and the telescope were severely hit. We are in the process of fixing and cleaning our offices and we should be back and running in a normal way in a couple of days.

'Champagne Supernova' breaks astronomical rules

Astronomers using Mauna Kea telescopes to study stars exploding as supernovae saw something so surprising they say it “has opened up a Pandora’s box.”

The astronomers discovered a supernova more massive than they believed possible, which may change their thinking about how stars explode as supernovae, they said in a paper published today in the journal Nature.

Astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, University of Toronto and University of California at Berkeley made the discovery during a survey for distant supernovae at the Canada France Hawaii Telescope.

Big Bang sounded like a deep hum

The sound of the Universe being born. University of Washington professor calculates the frequencies of sound waves propagating through the Universe during its first 760,000 years by analyzing small differences in sky temperature.

CFHT - image of the day

This gigantic emission nebula surrounding the blue reflection nebula NGC 6914 is still an active star-forming region.