Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Oct 15

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - October 15, 2004 * * *

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

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A PLANET FOUND THROUGH ASTEROID BELTS

Astronomers are almost ready to say it flat out: Beta Pictoris has a planet.
The planet's orbit is 25 percent larger than Saturn's, and its gravity has
herded smaller objects into belts much the way Jupiter has shaped our own solar
system's asteroid belt. "The Beta Pic system is likely to be at a violent,
planetesimal-collision stage in an early solar system," writes a Japanese team
led by Yoshiko K. Okamoto (Kitasato University) in the October 7th Nature.

Beta Pictoris is a young, 4th-magnitude white star (spectral type A3) 63
light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor. Its age is estimated at
just 12 to 20 million years. Beta Pic achieved stellar star status in 1983 when
the American-Dutch Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) discovered a large,
edge-on disk of gas and dust around it. Subsequent imaging of the disk revealed
warps and tilts, as well as a relatively empty region within 80 astronomical
units from the central star (twice the average distance of Pluto from the
Sun)....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1369_1.asp

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KEPLER'S SUPERNOVA IN THE SPOTLIGHT

By combining images from infrared, visual, and X-ray telescopes, a mosaic of
Kepler's Supernova Remnant reveals an expanding shell of metal-enriched stellar
material powered by a shock wave that rocks everything in its path.

Four-hundred years ago, on October 9, 1604, skywatchers -- including astronomer
Johannes Kepler -- first saw a bright new star shining at magnitude -2 in the
constellation Ophiuchus. It remained bright for weeks. At the time, no one knew
what is was, but now we recognize it as the last observed supernova within our
galaxy.

A team led by Ravi Sankrit and William Blair (Johns Hopkins University) used
multiwavelength data from three NASA space observatories -- the Chandra X-ray
Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope (visible light), and the Spitzer Space
Telescope (infrared) -- to image the scattered remains of the explosion....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1368_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* The red star Antares is to the lower-right of the crescent Moon in the
southwest at twilight on the 17th.
* First-quarter Moon on Wednesday, October 20th.
* The Orionid meteor shower peaks during the early morning hours of the
21st.

For more details, see This Week's Sky at a Glance and Planet Round up:

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance/

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*-----------------------------------------------------*
| Stuart Goldman |
* Associate Editor *
| Sky & Telescope |
* 49 Bay State Rd. Sky & Telescope: The Essential *
| Cambridge, MA 02138 Magazine of Astronomy |
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