Overall, the potential benefits of the mission are huge, the Keck team says.
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They are the first planets discovered by the enormous Keck telescope in Hawaii, the sharpest optical telescope in the world.
Keck Observatory and the Gemini Observatory, both in Hawaii, took images of three planets orbiting in the far reaches of the system.
Using Keck I, a telescope on a mountain-top in Hawaii, the physicists analysed light emanating from very bright but distant galaxies called quasars.
"Extraction of propellants, bulk shielding and life support fluids from this first captured asteroid could jump-start an entire space-based industry, " the Keck team writes.
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The Keck interferometer, now under construction at Mauna Kea on Hawaii, will combine four 1.8-metre telescopes to mimic a 100-metre telescope in just this way.
As Keck characterizes it, the South Carolina plan focuses on fixing the health care system, while the Obama administration focuses on fixing the health insurance system.
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CNN's Jessica Yellin and Kristi Keck contributed to this report.
The biggest that have ever been built are those in the two ten-metre (394 inch) Keck telescopes on Mauna Kea, but each of those had to be assembled from 36 separate pieces.
The infra-red radiation emitted by the dust can also be used to measure the size of the ring directly, and this has been done using the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.
The work, which is described in the journal Nature, actually draws on observations made by several astronomical facilities, including the Keck and James Clerk Maxwell telescopes in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit around the Earth.
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Viewed from ten light-years away, the sun's side-to-side astrometric wobble due to the effect of the earth is just one millionth of an arcsecond, or a twentieth of the tiniest angle that the Keck will be able to measure.
China scholar Pei Minxin, professor of government and director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College, has a simple explanation for why once-meek Chinese workers are increasingly frustrated with their pay and working conditions.
If it turns out to be a sunny day and let's hope it does a mirror the size of the one at Keck Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea shining into your apartment may require you to don sunglasses and draw the shades.
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