Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Jan 14

================================================== ======================

* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - January 14, 2005 * * *

================================================== ======================

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!

================================================== ======================

HOORAY FOR HUYGENS

Move over, Mars! Saturn's large moon Titan is now the most distant world
touched by the hand of human technology. On Friday January 14th the European
Space Agency, in partnership with NASA, delivered the Huygens probe safely to
the surface of Titan after a long descent by parachute through the moon's
dense, haze-shrouded atmosphere. Touchdown occurred about 13:34 Central
European Time (7:34 a.m. EST)....

The probe's Descent Imager and Spectral Radiometer (DSIR) recorded about 350
images in all, and within hours mission scientists were left open-mouthed by
their first close-up looks at Titan's amazing landscape....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1442_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ORION TELESCOPES SOLD TO IMAGINOVA

In a move that caught the astronomical community by surprise, on January 13th
Imaginova Corp. announced its purchase of Orion Telescopes & Binoculars. Based
in Watsonville, California, Orion is a major manufacturer and distributor of
telescopes and other accessories for the amateur-astronomy market. Negotiations
between the two companies began about six months ago; financial terms of the
transaction were not disclosed.

"The acquisition of Orion Telescopes & Binoculars brings one of the most
prestigious brands in astronomy into the Imaginova family of media and consumer
products," said Daniel Stone, Imaginova's president and chief executive
officer, in a press release....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1440_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

SPITZER REVEALS GREEDY STELLAR BABIES IN TRIFID

Stars in the process of forming compete with one another for resources as they
grow. That's just one of the results that has emerged from new Spitzer Space
Telescope infrared images that penetrate dust in the Trifid Nebula (M20), which
lies 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

Spitzer uncovered 120 young stars and 30 even younger protostars behind the
dust. Ten of the protostars reside in four dense knots of dust, where
astronomers had previously thought conditions weren't right for star formation.
"Finally, with Spitzer infrared images, we can see what's going on in here,"
says team leader Jeonghee Rho (Caltech)....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1439_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

DISK DEMOLITION DERBY

Two teams of astronomers have reported signs of recent collisions between
planetesimals orbiting Sunlike stars in circumstellar disks.

One team, led by Kate Y. L. Su (University of Arizona), used the Spitzer Space
Telescope to image the disk around Vega in the mid-infrared with unprecedented
sensitivity. Su and her colleagues found signs that much of the disk material
is in the form of dust grains just a few microns across. Stellar radiation
pressure should blow such small grains out of the system in short order, so
Su's team suspects they come from recent collisions....

A second team, led by Charles M. Telesco (University of Florida), has found
evidence for a collision of 100-km objects around Beta Pictoris just 100 years
ago or so -- adding new detail to a finding by Yoshiko K. Okamoto announced
last October....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1438_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

GALAXY MAPS REVEAL NATURE OF UNIVERSE

Maps provide windows into the past. For instance, towns and villages are
distributed differently in Europe than they are in North America, because the
two continents experienced very different settlement histories. Likewise,
three-dimensional maps of the distribution of galaxies contain valuable
information about the early history of the universe and the way its large-scale
structure came into being. The latest results from two comprehensive galaxy
surveys independently confirm the important role of dark matter and dark energy
in the evolution of the cosmos. "The concordant picture of the universe is
hanging together amazingly well," says Martin J. Rees (Cambridge University,
England)....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1436_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

EXOPLANET IMAGE CONFIRMED?

Astronomers may have their long-coveted first image of an extrasolar planet,
thanks to follow-up observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope. But it all
depends on the definition of a "planet." The object in question does not orbit
a normal star. Rather, it orbits a brown dwarf -- an object containing
insufficient mass to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that power stars. The
brown dwarf is only five times heavier than its companion.

A French team led by Gael Chauvin (European Southern Observatory) found the
planet candidate in April 2004....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1435_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A BLACK HOLE SWARM

Like mosquitos hovering around a mountain, small black holes swarm around the
supermassive black hole in the core of the Milky Way. According to a team led
by Michael P. Muno (University of California, Los Angeles), there may be as
many as 20,000 stellar-mass black holes lurking within a three-light-year-wide
sphere surrounding the 3-million-solar-mass behemoth in our galactic center.

Stellar-mass black holes, which contain roughly 5 to 20 solar masses, often
give themselves away when they are part of closely separated binary systems....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1433_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

HUBBLE SPIES TWISTED SPIRAL

Half of the spiral galaxies in the present-day universe are barred -- and no
one knows why. If Patricia Knezek (WIYN consortium) has her way, however,
exciting new Hubble Space Telescope images may help astronomers understand what
sets these galaxies apart from their pure pinwheel kin.

At last week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Diego,
Knezek and Zoltan Levay (Space Telescope Science Institute) unveiled a stunning
image of NGC 1300, a large, 10th-magnitude barred spiral some 70 million
light-years distant in the constellation Eridanus....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1434_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

INTRIGUING IAPETUS

In Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the spaceship Discovery
heads to Saturn's enigmatic moon Iapetus in search of ET (in the movie,
Discovery instead ventures to Jupiter). In real life, NASA's Cassini spacecraft
flew by Iapetus for another reason: to provide answers to an enduring mystery:
why is the leading hemisphere as dark as asphalt, while the other is as
reflective as freshly-fallen snow?

On the final day of 2004, NASA's Cassini orbiter flew by Iapetus at a range of
only 123,000 kilometers (about 76,000 miles, or one-third the average
Earth-Moon distance). Images from the close encounter show unprecedented
detail....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1432_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

Spacecraft Sets Out to Strike a Comet

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 1:47 p.m.
Eastern time on January 12th, and began its six-month journey to strike a
comet. If all goes as planned, Deep Impact will reach 9P/Tempel 1 in July and
release a 370-kilogram projectile that will slam into the comet's nucleus at 10
kilometers per second. Instruments aboard the spacecraft, as well as
ground-based and Earth-orbiting telescopes, will scrutinize the spray of
liberated material. The impact should provide data about the comet's subsurface
chemical composition, while the size and shape of the resulting crater will
yield valuable insight into the internal structure of the icy body.

One aspect of the Deep Impact mission has been the involvement of amateur
astronomers. Backyard observers participating in the Small Telescope Science
Program are already monitoring the comet, but activity will swing into high
gear at the time of collision on July 4th. Researchers don't know exactly what
will happen when the projectile hits, but they say the comet could briefly
brighten to 6th magnitude.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1437_1.asp

================================================== ======================

HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* First-quarter Moon on January 16-17.
* Saturn (magnitude -0.4, just past opposition in Gemini) shines brightly in
the east after nightfall.
* Moonlight returns to the evening sky this week, compromising the view of
Comet Machholz. But moonlight or no, Machholz will still be visible in
binoculars during the next two weeks, glowing at 4th magnitude and resembling a
fuzzcloud with a brighter core.

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

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance

================================================== ======================

CRUISE TO TOTALITY (Advertisement)
South Pacific Total Eclipse Cruise April 3-19

SKY & TELESCOPE and TravelQuest International invite you to join us as we sail
aboard the newly refurbished MV Discovery to witness April's total solar
eclipse near Polynesia. En route to and from our eclipse site we'll visit
exotic Tahiti, meet descendents of the HMS Bounty's crew on Pitcairn Island,
wander amid the mysterious stone statues of Easter Island, and walk in the
footsteps of the Inca in Peru. Add to all that the spectacular southern sky,
and you have the astronomical adventure of a lifetime.

http://www.tq-international.com/Sout.../SoPachome.htm

================================================== ======================

Copyright 2005 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided as a
free service to the astronomical community by the editors of SKY & TELESCOPE
magazine. Widespread electronic distribution is encouraged as long as our
copyright notice is included, along with the words "used by permission." But
this bulletin may not be published in any other form without written permission
from Sky Publishing; send e-mail to or call +1
617-864-7360. More astronomy news is available on our Web site at
http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

To subscribe to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin or to S&T's Skywatcher's Bulletin,
which calls attention to noteworthy celestial events, go to this address:

http://SkyandTelescope.com/shopatsky/emailsubscribe.asp

================================================== ======================

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