Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Jun 17

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - June 17, 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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CATCH COMET LINEAR SPLITTING IN TWO

The brightest comet in the sky right now isn't Tempel 1 or the fading
Machholz. It's one you've probably never heard of: Comet LINEAR, C/2005
K2, glowing at magnitude 8.5 as of June 15th. It's visible with a
telescope in the northwestern sky at the end of evening twilight -- but
only for a few more days.

This minor comet recently brightened radically after going through a
dramatic change. Observers in Europe and the U.S. have obtained CCD
images that show what looks like its nucleus shedding a big fragment.
LINEAR's secondary nucleus appeared as a small, 17th-magnitude fuzzy
blob northeast of the primary, slowly drifting away in the direction of
the comet's short tail.

This breakup may have been the cause of C/2005 K2's ongoing outburst in
brightness....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/article_1531_1.asp

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NEW TYPE OF EXOPLANET: A HYBRID EARTH-URANUS

After three years of maintaining secrecy while collecting more and more
evidence, this week a team of astronomers announced finding an entirely
new type of planet orbiting a dim star 15 light-years away. The object
is the lightest known extrasolar planet orbiting a normal star, with a
mass between 6 and 9 Earths and most likely around 7.5 Earth masses. At
a National Science Foundation press conference this afternoon, Geoffrey
W. Marcy (University of California, Berkeley), R. Paul Butler (Carnegie
Institution of Washington), and four colleagues called their find the
most Earthlike world yet discovered outside our solar system.

While that is technically true, the planet is truly weird by any
Earthly standard....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1530_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Watch Saturn and Mercury close in on bright Venus around dusk during
the next few days. Look west-northwest.
* 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 Spica using the chart in the June SKY & TELESCOPE, page 68

* Full Moon on June 21-22.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance

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Copyright 2005 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is
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Stuart Goldman
Associate Editor http://SkyandTelescope.com
Night Sky Magazine http://NightSkyMag.com
49 Bay State Rd.
Cambridge, MA 02138