Keck Observatory

Thomas E. Everhart, who has headed Caltech for the last nine years, announced Wednesday that he will step down as president next year. In a letter to faculty and students, Everhart, 64, said he was making his announcement now to provide ample time to find a successor who can continue some of the broad initiatives already underway to enhance the quality of education and research at the famed Pasadena institution.

Nowadays Big Science requires Big Money. Recognizing that fact, the W. M. Keck Foundation has come up with a $70-million gift to Caltech to build the world's largest optical telescope, a 10-meter (400-inch) instrument that will enable astronomers to peer farther into the universe and further back in time than ever before. Because the universe is expanding, the farther away an object is, the longer ago it was created.

Squinting into the dark heart of the Milky Way, astronomers have discovered a star that orbits closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy than any other star yet observed. The relatively dim star, known as S0-102, is so close that it takes just 11.5 years to circle the black hole at speeds as high as 5,000 kilometers per second - or 1.7% as fast as the speed of light. The previous record-holder, S0-2, took 16 years to make its way around. A black hole is a star whose mass has collapsed to a point called a singularity.

Hoping to develop one of the world's major observatories, San Diego State University officials have announced plans to build a powerful, $2-million research telescope at their Mt. Laguna Observatory 40 miles east of San Diego. The university hopes the 100-inch telescope will attract astronomers from around the world to study at the observatory, which sits 6,100 feet above sea level in the Cleveland National Forest. Its visitor center already has two apartments for visiting astronomers.

Squinting into the dark heart of the Milky Way, astronomers have discovered the closest star yet to the galaxy's supermassive black hole. The relatively dim star, S0-102, takes just 11.5 years to circle the black hole.  The previous record-holder, S0-2, took 16 years to make its way around. A black hole is a star whose mass has collapsed to a point, a singularity. Its intense gravity distorts space-time so much that not even light can escape. The one at the center of the Milky Way contains the mass of 4 million suns.

Astronomers have had great success using tools like NASA's Kepler space telescope to peer into the heavens and find planets outside our solar system, but they haven't yet been able to describe those worlds in great depth. In large part, that is because they usually detect so-called exoplanets through indirect means - by observing how they obscure a tiny bit of light as they pass between their star and our vantage point, or how their gravity makes their host star wobble.  Scientists can surmise a planet's distance from its star and some details about its size and mass, but it's difficult for them, for instance, to characterize the components in an exoplanet atmosphere - the kind of detail that might help researchers assess, someday, whether life could thrive on a planet or not.  But on Thursday, a team of Canadian and American scientists reported new observations that provide unprecedented detail about a large, gaseous planet orbiting a young, bright star called HR 8799, about 130 light years away from our sun. The observations, made using at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, were published online in the journal Science . Pointing the telescope toward the far-off planetary system and analyzing infrared signals, the team could see “chemical fingerprints” of the atmosphere of the giant planet HR 8799c that potentially explain how it formed, the study's coauthors said Wednesday during a phone call with reporters.

The W. M. Keck Foundation on Monday will announce a gift of $150 million to boost scientific research at USC's medical school and at two affiliated hospitals, adding to the university's recent success in attracting supersized donations. The gift is the single largest in the 57-year history of the Keck Foundation, which has backed many scientific projects, including the famous Keck Observatory and telescopes in Hawaii. For USC, the money marks the third mega-gift since March, for a total of $460 million, as new President C. L. Max Nikias seeks to build the Los Angeles university's endowment.

An international team of astronomers on Monday announced the discovery of 28 planets outside the solar system, the greatest single haul since the first so-called exoplanet was found 12 years ago. Still eluding the planet hunters, however, is the much-longed-for Earth replica, a planet like ours that could nourish some kind of life, allowing humans to feel a little less lonely in the cosmos.

Auto navigation systems that display maps and directions have been showing up in high-priced cars for several years. Aside from cost, the main drawback of these digital maps is that they require drivers to take their eyes off the road to continually glance at the map. But AudioNav, developed by Burbank-based Amerigon Inc. and scheduled for release later this year, allows you to literally tell the system where you want to go and receive voice directions on how to get there.

Launching its 25th anniversary year, public-television station KCET Channel 28 said Thursday that it has received an unprecedented $5.3-million grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to produce a six-part series about astronomy. "The Astronomers," which the station said will present "the scientists and technologies that are revolutionizing our current knowledge of the universe," is scheduled for national airing on PBS during the 1990-91 TV season. "To the best of our knowledge," said William H.