Sky & Telescope's News Bulletin - Jun 25

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - June 25, 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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MOON STUDY TRACKS CHANGES IN EARTH'S CLOUD COVER

Perhaps you've noticed at times that the "dark" part of a crescent Moon isn't
completely dark. Sunlight reflected by Earth casts an eerie glow on the shaded
lunar disk, in a phenomenon known as earthshine. The cloudier it gets, the more
light Earth reflects onto the Moon, so measuring earthshine is a good way to
track cloud cover. And by monitoring earthshine over a period of several years,
astronomers have discovered what might be an important factor for predicting
climate change....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1287_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

Animation of "Sunspots" on Another Star

Astronomers have created an animation showing newly discovered starspots being
carried around on the surface of another star, Kappa Ceti. Jaymie Matthews
(University of British Columbia) and his collaborators created the animation
after tracking tiny changes in the star's brightness using the Earth-orbiting
Microvariability and Oscillations of Stars (MOST) telescope. The animation
covers a 29-day period and shows an enormous spot gradually gaining on a
smaller one as a result of the different rotation rates at different latitudes
on the star.

Two New Planets Discovered by Transits

Hot on the heels of the first planet discovered via transits come two more,
both Jupiter-size and with some of the tightest orbits ever seen. Francois
Bouchy (Marseille Astrophysical Laboratory) and his team of astronomers
discovered the two planets by performing follow-up observations on two stars
that had been seen dimming by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment
(OGLE) survey. Their observations with the 8.2-meter VLT Kueyen telescope
revealed Doppler shifts caused by the tug of each planet on its parent star.
The shape of the light curve combined with the radial-velocity measurements
allowed Bouchy's team to pin down a mass for each planet. OGLE-TR-113 orbits an
F-type star 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Carina and is 35
percent heavier than Jupiter. It orbits its star 17 times closer than Mercury
orbits the Sun, with an orbital radius of just 3.4 million kilometers and an
orbital period of 1.43 days. OGLE-TR-132 is also in Carina, orbiting a K-dwarf
star 1,200 light-years away. It has about the same mass as Jupiter and orbits
its star in 1.69 days.

Stardust Reveals Comet Surprises

NASA's Stardust spacecraft encountered a few surprises when it flew by Comet
81P/Wild 2 last January 2nd. As reported on SkyandTelescope.com, in the June
issue of SKY & TELESCOPE magazine, and at last week's NASA news conference, the
comet looks very different than scientists expected. Craters, cliffs, and
100-meter-high spires cover the surface, indicating that the material is much
more rigid and cohesive than predicted. Scientists were also surprised at how
"clumpy" Wild 2's coma was, with dense patches of dust interspersed between
zones of relative emptiness. The spacecraft's mass spectrometer detected
organic compounds such as cyanide (CN), but detected many fewer particles than
predicted.

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1286_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Tuesday, June 29th. Look for orange-red Antares twinkling to the lower left
of the Moon this evening.
* Wednesday, June 30th. Jupiter's moon Io reappears from eclipse out of
Jupiter's shadow around 10:28 p.m. EDT.
* Full Moon on Friday, July 2nd (exact at 7:09 a.m. EDT).

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

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

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Copyright 2004 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided as a
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from Sky Publishing; send e-mail to or call +1
617-864-7360. More astronomy news is available on our Web site at
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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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