Posted: Jan 11, 2021
Photo 2, caption and credit in text
University of Hawaiʻi Astronomers Using W. M. Keck Observatory Discover Ancient Magma World Orbiting a Chemically Unusual Star
Maunakea, Hawaii - “They should have sent a poet,” says Ellie Arroway in the film Contact as, suspended in outer space, she gazes upon a spiral galaxy. Almost all of the planets discovered to date (including the solar system planets) are confined to the plane of the Milky Way, unable to glimpse such a sweeping vista of our galaxy. However, astronomers at the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) using the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea have discovered a rocky planet with a different kind of view.
NASA/Ames Research Center/W. Stenzel/D. Rutter)
From centuries of studying the planets within our solar system, astronomers have wondered how planets form and evolve to become the ones we observe today. A team of astronomers led by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Institute for Astronomy (
IfA) graduate student
Travis Berger found that an intriguing class of Neptune-sized planets shrink over billions of years. The study was published in the
One of the most surprising findings of the past decade was the discovery of a new branch in the planetary “family tree,” separating slightly larger than Earth (super-Earths) from those somewhat smaller than Neptune (sub-Neptunes). However, it is unclear how these different-sized planets formed, as observations are only a single snapshot out of a billions of years long lifetime for each individual planetary system.
“The idea of the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life is no more speculative than extra dimensions or dark matter. It fact, he says, it is less so,” says Harvard astrophysicist, Avi Loeb.
In November of 2018, The Daily Galaxy reported: “You would have thought it was 1938 again following Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of the War of the Worlds the way the way Twitter lit up last week when the chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, Israel-born theoretical physicist Avi Loeb, suggested that an alien spaceship was possibly on its way to Earth to study humankind, and probably had Stephen Hawking spinning in his grave.”
Researchers making the list were identified as scientists who are influencing the future direction of their respective fields. Fewer than 0.1% of the world’s researchers, across 22 research fields, have earned this exclusive distinction.
Shidler Professor Stephen Vargo
This is Vargo’s seventh consecutive year named to the list in the business and economics discipline. Vargo earned the recognition by demonstrating exceptional influence through his publications, which were frequently cited by his peers during the last decade. His articles focused on the “Service-Dominant (
S-D) Logic” framework, which redefines how value is co-created through economic exchange.
“We are extremely proud of Professor Vargo. He is an excellent researcher and mentor to our doctoral students as well as our junior faculty,” Shidler College of Business Dean