Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Jun 3

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - June 3, 2005 * * *

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Welcome to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin. Images, the full stories
abridged here, and other enhancements are on our Web site,
SkyandTelescope.com, at the URLs provided. (If the links don't work,
just manually type the URLs into your Web browser.) Clear skies!

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BROWN-DWARF BINARY MAY CHALLENGE THEORIES

At this week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, Vanderbilt University astronomer Yilen Gomez Maqueo Chew and
five colleagues presented detailed observations of the first known
eclipsing binary system containing two brown dwarfs -- starlike gas
balls not quite massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion in their
cores. Seen from Earth as a single point of light, the system resides
in the Orion Nebula (M42) and is therefore several million years old --
ancient in human terms, but extremely young by the standards that apply
to lightweight stars.

Gomez Maqueo Chew's team has monitored the "star" over the past three
years with the 1.3-meter SMARTS telescope at the Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The team nailed down the major
characteristics of both of the system's brown dwarfs by garnering two
complementary kinds of data...

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1525_1.asp

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TELESCOPE ENTHUSIASTS CONVERGE IN CALIFORNIA

Clear, dark skies and beautiful spring weather greeted the more than
1,600 stargazers who attended the annual RTMC Astronomy Expo (formerly
the Riverside Telescope Makers Conference) near Big Bear City,
California, last weekend. Hundreds of telescopes were on display and in
use, with stunning views of the solar system and the universe always
within arm's reach -- or within a few steps up a ladder to the eyepiece
of a giant Dobsonian reflector...

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1524_1.asp

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GALEX PROVIDES ULTRAVIOLET GOODIES

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite inadvertently picked up
an assortment of astronomical goodies in our solar neighborhood while
surveying distant galaxies in ultraviolet light. The satellite's large
field of view, 1.5 degrees, catches many nearby objects that
unexpectedly flare and glow in this high-energy part of the spectrum.
Barry Welsh (University of California, Berkeley) described some of the
interesting phenomena that turned up in GALEX's "contaminated"
observations, including an exciting flare in a red-dwarf star whose
brightness increased more than 10,000 times.

The unique capabilities of the GALEX cameras allow astronomers to make
stellar observations on a much faster timescale than normal. Its photon
counting camera can take a picture about once every 0.05 second...

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1523_1.asp

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NEWS FROM DAY 1 OF THE AAS MEETING

The first day of the American Astronomical Society's meeting in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, yielded a flurry of exciting new science
results. But a dark cloud of anxiety looms over the conference as
astronomical research in the United States faces an uncertain future in
a tightening fiscal environment.

A team led by Nathan Smith (University of Colorado) presented one of
the major science results: a new Spitzer Space Telescope infrared image
of the Carina Nebula. This nebula, which is visible to the naked eye in
the Southern Hemisphere, harbors dozens of unstable, extremely massive
stars. These stars blow winds at up to 1,600 kilometers per second (4
million miles per hour) -- with disastrous consequences for their
surroundings....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1520_1.asp

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STRONGEST SOURCE OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?

Astronomers have new evidence that a 21st-magnitude speck in Cancer may
be the strongest source in our sky of gravitational waves -- weak,
elusive ripples in the fabric of space-time that should be washing
through the solar system, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of
relativity. If the ultrasensitive LISA gravitational-wave detector gets
built, this object could be the first thing it sees.

At the American Astronomical Society meeting now under way in
Minneapolis, Tod Strohmayer (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) reported
on periodic X-ray pulsations from a source known as RX J0806.3+1527.
The pulsations, found with the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, agree with
earlier, visible-light observations indicating that the source is a
pair of white-dwarf stars orbiting each other in a tight binary system.
The two collapsed stars are separated by only 80,000 kilometers (50,000
miles, or one-fifth the Earth-Moon distance) and circle each other
every 5.36 minutes. No known binary star has a shorter orbital
period...

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1521_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* New Moon on Monday, June 6th.
* A very thin crescent Moon shines near Venus on June 7th and 8th.
* Jupiter (magnitude -2.2, in Virgo) glares high in the south to
southwest during evening -- the brightest "star" in the sky.
* Comet Tempel 1 -- which NASA's Deep Impact mission will blast with a
projectile on the night of July 3rd -- is currently glowing at about
magnitude 10.3 in the evening sky, a little fainter than predicted.
Find it near Delta Virginis using the chart in the June SKY &
TELESCOPE, page 68.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance

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Copyright 2005 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is
provided as a free service to the astronomical community by the editors
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Stuart Goldman
Associate Editor http://SkyandTelescope.com
Night Sky Magazine http://NightSkyMag.com
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Cambridge, MA 02138