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Parliamentary HonorWest O'ahu’s William J. Puette elected president of the Aloha 'Ohana Parliamentary Unit. Read more
Student Research at the Maui High Performance Computing CenterProjects receive more than $127,000 in grants. Read more
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Healthy Living in Hawai'iKapi'olani’s culinary arts releases A DASH of Aloha: Healthy Hawai'i Cuisine and Lifestyle. Read moreReady for Valentine’s DayUH Alumni win wedding contest and West O‘ahu student finalist for Most Romantic Man. Read more
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Lisa J. Kewley and J. Patrick Henry
American Astronomical Society Awards
Manoa Associate Astronomer Lisa J. Kewley won the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize in Astronomy and Professor J. Patrick Henry is one of four scientists to receive the Rossi Prize.
Kewley and Henry both make use of the fact that light from distant parts of the Universe can take billions of years to arrive at Earth. By pointing their telescopes at objects that are at different distances from Earth they can study how the average properties of galaxies and of clusters of galaxies have changed over the 14-billion-year life of the universe.
Kewley studies individual galaxies. Using telescopes on Mauna Kea and elsewhere, she discovered major differences between old and new galaxies in properties such as the rate at which new stars are formed, the concentration of oxygen and the presence of a quasar-like nucleus. As a by-product of her research, she calculated that most of the oxygen atoms we breathe were created between five and 12 billion years ago.
Henry focuses his attention on galaxy clusters because they contain the largest known concentrations of dark matter—the mysterious invisible substance that makes up most of the mass of the universe. By studying galaxy clusters with X-ray telescopes in space and optical telescopes on Mauna Kea, he was able to determine how fast clusters of galaxies were being formed at different times in the past. From this he could deduce how much dark matter there is in the universe and how lumpy it is.