SPACE NEWS

SPACE NEWS
of Extra-Solar Space
99 thru 04

. . See also: Planetary Space (old) News.)
. . See the 2006 Solar-area news.

See Go to "The Drake Equation" on the likelihood of life elsewhere.

Dec 8, 04: Planet-building is dusty work, and now two space telescopes have captured images of cosmic construction materials: disks of dust circling stars about the same size as our sun. Pictures from NASA's Hubble and Spitzer telescopes give the clearest look yet at the early and late phases of the planetary construction process.
. . The Hubble managed to see a very young sun-like star --a mere 50 million to 250 million years old-- with a big ring of potentially planet-forming dust around it. This is old enough to form a gas planet, but probably too young to have produced an Earth-like rocky planet, scientists said.
. . Observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope indicate six middle-aged sun-like stars with much thinner dust disks around them. At about 4 billion years old, these six are almost as old as the sun.
. . Astronomers already knew these stars harbored planets, because they had been detected earlier by watching the characteristic wobble that the unseen planets' gravity produces in the stars they circle.

Dec 1, 04: The Hubble Space Telescope has photographed what might be the youngest galaxy ever seen, a hotbed of star birth that formed within the past one billion years. The galaxy, named I Zwicky 18, might have been born as recently as 500 million years ago -- about the time complex life began to appear on Earth. The uncertain age for the galaxy's birth is the result of two separate studies.
. . The galaxy, classified as a dwarf irregular, is surprisingly nearby for one so young. It is just 45 million light-years away. "This is extraordinary because one would expect young galaxies to be forming only around the first billion years or so after the Big Bang, not some 13 billion years later."
. . Astronomers are curious how Zwicky kept its natal gas cloud of hydrogen and helium in an embryonic state for all those eons.

Nov 24, 04: Incredibly-massive black holes had fully matured just a billion years after the birth of the universe, according to two separate new studies. Scientists already had strong evidence that black holes grew to gargantuan heft early in the universe. Several have been found to pack the mass of hundreds of millions of Suns or more. But now scientists are pushing the limit of how far back in time they spot such objects and improving the firmness of their measurements.
. . In a new study, a black hole catalogued as SDSSp J1306 appears to be about one billion times as massive as the Sun. It is 12.7 billion light-years away, meaning the light just recorded --by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory-- took 12.7 billion years to reach the vicinity of Earth.
. . The universe is thought to be 13.7 billion years old.

Objects at a distance from a black hole feel no greater pull than if the black hole were a star of equal mass.

Nov 15, 04: Astronomers think they have found a rare if not unique black hole very near the center of the Milky Way. That would make two. The discovery also adds weight to the idea that black holes come in three sizes, essentially small, medium and large.
. . Stellar black holes --the remains of collapsed stars, are common. They typically harbor as much mass as a few suns. And for years, scientists have known there are supermassive black holes in many galaxies; one with the mass of more than three million suns anchors the Milky Way.
. . The newly detected object appears to be an intermediate mass black hole, packing about 1,300 solar masses. Orbiting the presumed middleweight are seven stars, each of which in its prime was more than 40 times the mass of the Sun. Even as corpses they contain five to 10 solar masses. The whole setup is racing around the galactic center at 280 kilometers per second.
. . Intermediate mass black holes ought to exist, some theorists say, because they should have been the building blocks of supermassive black holes.
. . It is now less than 1.5 light-years from the fringes of the known supermassive black hole. That's much closer than our Sun is to the next nearest star.

Nov 6, 04: Cosmic Rays: Scientists first discovered the energetic particles that bombard the Earth nearly a century ago but where they come from has been one of the big questions in astrophysics.
. . Using an array of four telescopes in Africa, the scientists produced the first image showing that the source of cosmic rays could be the remnant of a supernova, a powerful explosion of a star at the end of its life. "This is the first time we were able to take an image of the source."

Nov 1, 04: Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe spotted a new star in the sky on Nov. 11, 1572 --432 years ago-- and astronomers have been trying ever since to figure out exactly what happened. The case appears to be solved.
. . A star racing away from the explosive scene has been found. It's about 10,000 light-years from Earth, & flying through space three times faster than others in its vicinity, a dead giveaway that it was shot like a cannon from the scene of a supernova eruption.
. . The visible light faded with time, but the region still emits intense X-ray and radio energy as an expanding bubble of matter slams into interstellar gas.
. . Some astronomers have suggested type 1a supernovas --the variety apparently seen by Tycho Brahe-- might be the result of stellar collisions between two white dwarfs, rather than the mass-transfer idea. "If we accept that the companion has been identified, then we now know for the first time that not all type-Ia supernovae are produced by coalescence of white dwarfs."
. . All this is important in part because type 1a supernovas are rare in our galaxy but common in the universe as a whole. All of them achieve an almost identical maximum brightness, then fade at a nearly identical rate. So astronomers use them as "standard candles" to measure distances to faraway galaxies.

Oct 20, 04: Earth's spin warps space around the planet, according to a new study that confirms a key prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity. After 11 years of watching the movements of two Earth-orbiting satellites, researchers found each is dragged by about 2 meters every year because the very fabric of space is twisted by our whirling world. The results, announced today, are much more precise than preliminary findings published by the same group in the late 1990s.
. . The effect is called frame dragging. It is a modification to the simpler aspects of gravity set out by Newton. Working from Einstein's relativity theory, Austrian physicists Joseph Lense and Hans Thirring predicted frame dragging in 1918.
. . Any object with mass warps the space-time around it, in much the same way as a heavy object deforms a stretched elastic sheet. If the object spins, another distortion is introduced, "in the same way as the elastic sheet would be twisted by a spinning heavy wheel on it."
. . If the space around Earth is being frame-dragged, then satellites ought to be caught up in the deformation, scientists reasoned. Imagine how a second object on the elastic sheet would be moved by the scrunching motion created as the sheet is deformed.

Oct 27, 04: Astronomers were surprised to find in a new survey that about 20% of the stars within 1,000 light-years of the Sun are moving on a bunch of offbeat trajectories, not circular paths, like Sol.
. . The team believes the stars have been gravitationally stirred by the spiral arms of the Milky Way. Each arm is packed with more stars and gas than the areas between the arms. These density waves, as astronomers call them, compress gas and force star formation. They can also deflect the motion of stars.
. . In principle, the newly realized star paths mean the chance of a collision or other interaction with the Sun is greater than was previously known. Our next known close encounter with another star will occur 1.4 million years from now. A star named Gliese 710 (tho not in one of those streams) found by Hipparcos and reported in 1999, will pass within 1 light-year of the Sun. That puts it some 70,000 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, on the very fringes of our solar system where icy objects are thought to roam in what's known as the Oort Cloud. Such stellar close calls in the past are thought to have rerouted comets from the Oort Cloud toward the inner solar system, where some hit Earth.

Oct 18, 04: In some theories, the brutal stage of planet growth lasts perhaps 10 million years or so — an eye blink in astronomical terms. This is followed by a long, steady, quieter cleanup period in which the unused dust dissipates.
. . New findings indicate the violent phase may last much longer. NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that some dust rings around stars remained big and bright even though their stars were 100 million to 200 million years old. Scientists said the discs couldn't have survived that long unless violent collisions between embryonic planets and gigantic chunks of rock were constantly replenishing them.

Oct 18, 04: 400,000 km, or roughly the distance between Earth and the Moon --that's how much farther the Pioneer probes should have traveled in their 34 years, if our understanding of gravity is correct. Scientists are quick to suggest the Pioneer anomaly, as they call it, is probably caused by the space probes themselves, perhaps emitting heat or gas. But the possibilities have been tested and modeled and penciled out, and so far they don't add up. Which leaves open staggering possibilities that would force wholesale reprinting of all physics books:

Invisible dark matter is tugging at the probes
Other dimensions create small forces we don't understand
Gravity works differently than we think

. . Another idea is that gravity tugs slightly harder at things farther away. That radical suggestion, if proved true, would force a modification of Einstein's general theory of relativity and might eliminate dark matter as a player.
. . Yet one more exotic possibility: Dimensions exist beyond the four we know (three directions and time). Models of string theory propose that higher dimensions could provide weak forces that act in ways we don't yet comprehend.

Oct 12, 04: Perched on the top of one of Mexico's highest mountains is a gigantic, half-built telescope that scientists hope will reveal more secrets of the universe's early years than any before it. With a base like a launching pad and an antenna the size of a big Ferris wheel, the telescope will be able to pick up electromagnetic radiation known as millimeter waves emitted 13 billion years ago, when the first stars burst into existence.
. . The Large Millimeter Telescope or LMT, is a U.S.-Mexican project being built on the 15,026-foot summit of Sierra Negra, Mexico's fifth-highest peak, in air so thin that bottled oxygen is at hand. The team plans to enrich observation and rest rooms at the site with extra oxygen. "You can make silly mistakes when the brain lacks oxygen."
. . With an antenna diameter of exactly 50 meters, the LMT will dwarf existing millimeter-wave telescopes and should be able to pick up signals from the faintest objects in outer space. While optical telescopes detect light rays and others look for radio, infrared or gamma waves, the LMT will pick up electromagnetic radiation at wavelengths of 1 to 3 millimeters -- shorter than radio waves but longer than infrared, visible light and gamma rays.
. . These millimeter waves are unique because they are not deflected by space dust or dimmed by distance. "We are going back to 400 million years after the big bang. We could discover hundreds of thousands of new galaxies."
. . While oblivious to light pollution, millimeter telescopes work best at altitudes where the percentage of water vapor in the air is low. Its 19 degree latitude position gives a perfect view of the southern sky where the center of the Milky Way is, and new technology will correct inaccuracies that could be caused by the weight and size of the antenna as it changes position.
. . It's due to be operational in 2007, after a crane big enough to hoist the antenna onto the base can be brought up the steep mountainside in sections.

Oct 7, 04: Anyone looking for signs of ET need not look in the center of our galaxy. Every 20 million years or so this region hosts a large increase in star formation. Some of these newly created stars burn hot and fast, only to die after a few million years in huge explosions that would expose any planets in the region to deadly radiation.
. . Earth is about 25,000 light-years from the galactic center, so these periodic sterilizations don't affect life here. A stellar explosion close enough to cause serious threat would only occur about once in a billion years.
. . The star formation peaks at the galactic center are caused by an inflow of gas from a ring of material about 500 light-years from the middle. The amount of material in the ring increases over time until it reaches a critical density, or tipping point, when an amount of matter equal to 30 million Suns collapses into the center --fueling a jump in star formation, known as a starburst. Next starburst: within the next 10 million years.

Oct 5, 04: The center of our galaxy is approximately 27,000 light-years away. Recent observations have shown that somewhere in this crowded region there is a source of intense energy --gamma rays-- that astronomers are struggling to identify. It could be from an exploded star, or possibly it is a signature of mysterious dark matter.
. . Gamma rays likely come from a jet spewing out from a supermassive black hole in the center of the distant galaxy. Seeing as our Milky Way has its own supermassive black hole weighing a few million solar masses, a good guess might be that it too, has a jet spraying gamma rays at us. One problem is that the radio and X-ray emissions from the black hole are hard to make consistent with the jet hypothesis.
. . Still, there are theories that try to imagine ways for the black hole to generate the necessary gamma rays without upsetting other constraints. A likely alternative source is an explosion, or supernova, of a star near the galactic center. One other possibility is that the gamma rays from the galactic center are from dark matter particles running into each other and self-destructing.

Oct 2, 04: Three powerful bursts of energy from different regions of space could presage spectacular explosions of huge stars, astronomers just announced. The eruptions are likely imminent. Yet never before have astronomers had such advance warning of the faraway explosions. In fact, they don't even know if their forecasts are right.
. . What is clear is that as the flashes develop into explosions --or not-- knowledge of how stars die is likely to grow.
. . Gamma-ray bursts are the most energetic events in the universe other than the Big Bang. They briefly outshine entire galaxies. Astronomers think each burst is related to the explosion of a very massive star that has used up its main fuel. Much material is blasted into space, and some falls back rapidly and collapses into a tiny sphere more dense than most folks can imagine, resulting in the formation of a black hole. In some cases, however, the energy might be unleashed when two black holes collide.
. . The leading theory is that when a star collapses after exploding, it sends out two incredibly swift jets of material, one along each of its poles. If a jet is pointed toward Earth, the thinking goes, we see a gamma-ray burst. Otherwise we note only the X rays. Other theorists argue that gamma-ray bursts and X-ray flashes are different animals altogether.

Sept 23, 04: Researchers are looking for the first galaxies, whose radiation burned off a cosmic fog that enveloped the universe just after the Big Bang, according to theory. Astronomers billed their findings as a possible glimpse of the "end of the opening act" of galaxy formation. They've found what they believe to be several of the earliest star-forming galaxies, in a detailed analysis of Hubble Space Telescope images.
. . The light from the young galaxies left them when the universe was just 5% of its present age, which is now approximately 13.7 billion years.

Sept 23, 04: Astronomers have spotted two monster galactic clusters slamming together in one of the biggest collisions ever recorded. It is located about 800 million light-years away.
. . The larger of the two galactic clusters probably contains 1,000 galaxies, while the smaller one has 300 or so. By comparison, the Milky Way does not belong to a galactic cluster, but is part of a group located on the outskirts of the Virgo cluster, which is about the same size as the smaller component of the big collision.

Sept 1, 04: More small planets: Neptune-mass planets around a small star called Gliese 436, some 30 light-years away -- & another, about 40 light-years away. Both zip around their respective stars in three days or less, at a small fraction of the distance that Earth orbits the sun. Both have diameters about two or three times the size of Earth.
. . The planet around 55 Cancri is the fourth planet detected there, but the others in that system fit the gas-giant mold. That star is already known to host three gas giant planets. This fourth known world is 18 times as massive as Earth, just slightly more massive than Neptune, Marcy said. It completes a year in a mere 2.81 Earth-days, circling just 5.7 million km from the star.
. . The other newest known planet is about 25 times as hefty as Earth. Its circular orbit is tight, too, a mere 2.64 Earth-days long around the star Gliese 436. It's probably tidally locked to the star, Marcy said, always showing it the same face -- just as Luna does with Earth. If rocky and barren, the lit surface would be about 377 Celsius (710 degrees F), and the back side far below zero. If the planet has a thick atmosphere like Venus, however, then the entire surface would be hot.
. . They don't think the two planets found by the U.S. team are made primarily of rock. They likely formed much farther out and migrated inward to their present orbits.
. . A European team of astronomers announced last week the discovery of a planet some 14 times Earth's mass.
. . A pair of soon-to-launch space observatories will soon race to find planets just like Earth in size and orbit. NASA's Kepler observatory is slated for launch in 2007. The European Space Agency's COROT mission will launch in 2006.

Working at the limits of its ability, the Yepun telescope was able to obtain a spectrum of the faint, very red object seen alongside 2M1207. The spectrum showed the signatures of water molecules and confirms that the object must be small and light. The spectrum obtained is probably that of a "young and hot planet" that will cool down to become a gas-giant world like Jupiter.

Aug 31, 04: Astronomers have discovered four more planets in a week's time. Now many experts say it won't be long before astronomers detect planets that are similar to Earth's dimensions and characteristics —-perhaps even suitable for sustaining life with an oxygen-rich atmosphere and oceans. One was spotted by the Europeans and is so close to its parent star that it completes an orbit in just four days.

Aug 25, 04: In a stunning discovery, European astronomers have found one of the smallest planets known outside our solar system, a world about 14 times the mass of our own around a star similar in size and brightness to Sol. It could be a rocky planet with a thin atmosphere, a sort of "super Earth". Its tight orbit is less than 9.5 days, &, being so close to its sun, its surface temp: around 1,160 degrees F. The star is like our Sun and just 50 light-years away. Most of the known extrasolar planets are hundreds or thousands of light-years distant.
. . That sun has two other planets. One is Jupiter-sized and takes 650 days to orbit the star. The other planet is farther out. The three-planet setup, with one being rocky, is unique.
. . Another trio of roughly Earth-sized planets was found in 2002, orbiting a neutron star. They are oddballs, circling a dark star that would not support life.
. . The newfound planet is about as heavy as Uranus. Theorists say 14 Earth-masses is roughly the upper limit for a planet to possibly remain rocky. it was detected by noting its gravitational effect on the star.
. . The so-far unnamed world, is the smallest of the estimated 125 so-called extrasolar planets that have been detected so far.
. . Another report gives it a gassy atmosphere, amounting to about a tenth of its mass [that's huge!]. What the gasses are is so far unknown. [ However much atmo, I'd guess nitrogen & CO2, but no H ammonia or methane -- they's be dissociated by the radiation & the H blown off. -jkh]

Aug 18, 04: Astronomers have used measurements from two distant 2nd-generation stars to come up with an age for our galaxy, the Milky Way. First-generation stars were found to be 200-300 million years older than those two.
. . A team working with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile report that our galaxy is 13,600 million years old, give or take 800 million years.

Aug 11, 04: A nearby star thought to harbor comets and asteroids now appears to be home to planets, too. The presumed worlds are smaller than Jupiter and could be as tiny as Pluto, new observations suggest. In new observations with the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, researchers found clumps in the disk --strong evidence that planets exist. The dust observations also reveal elliptical patterns that suggest the orbits of the planets are non-circular.
. . AU Microscopii, also known as AU Mic, is a relatively nearby and common sort of star. And it is young. Things around it are just gathering together out of the leftovers of star formation. AU Mic is half as massive as the Sun and one-tenth as luminous. It is roughly 10-12 million years old, an infant in star years (Sol is 4.6 billion years old). AU Mic is nearby -- just 33 light-years away.
. . Theory suggests the minimum possible diameter would similar to that of Pluto. He cautions that this does not mean there are any small planets around AU Mic --theory is not prepared to fully explain the new observations, he said.

Aug 8, 04: The Hubble Space Telescope may have discovered as many as 100 more new planets orbiting stars in our galaxy. If confirmed, it would almost double the number of planets known to be circling other stars to about 230. The discovery will lend support to the idea that almost every sunlike star in our galaxy, and probably the Universe, is accompanied by planets.
. . The planets were found during a seven-day observation period by astronomer Kailash Sahu. Some of the stars observed were seen to dim slightly in brightness. It is thought that a planet passing in front of the star is responsible for the dip in its light output. "Discovery of many planets near stars in the bulge of the galaxy would clearly demonstrate that planetary systems are very common around normal stars."
. . "We are not likely to have final results until this fall, perhaps September or October." They expect it should be possible to study the atmospheres of between 10% and 20% of the planets discovered.
. . NASA is studying options to refurbish the Hubble telescope.

July 18, 04: After almost 30 years of arguing that a black hole swallows up everything that falls into it, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking backpedaled. In doing so, he lost one of the most famous bets in recent scientific history. "A black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell inside. So we can be sure of the past and predict the future." Exactly what happens in a black hole —-a region in space where matter is compressed to such an extent that not even light can escape from its immense gravitational pull-— has long puzzled scientists.
. . Hawking revolutionized the study of the holes when he demonstrated in 1976 that, under the strange rules of quantum physics, once black holes form they start to "evaporate" away, radiating energy and losing mass in the process. Under this theory, black holes are not totally "black" because the vacuum of the imploding star lets out very tiny amounts of matter and energy in the form of photons, neutrinos and other subparticles.
. . By conjuring up this so-called "Hawking radiation", the Cambridge mathematician, who is paralyzed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also created one of the biggest conundrums in physics. These particles, he said, contained no information about what has been occurring inside the black hole, or how it formed. Under his theory, once the black hole evaporates, all the information within would be lost. But now, according to his latest revision, Hawking argues that eventually some of the information about the black hole can be determined from what it emits.

July 21, 04: Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said today that black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything they consume and instead can fire out matter and energy "in a mangled form."
. . "There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe", Hawking said in a speech to about 800 physicists and other scientists from 50 countries. "I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. It is great to solve a problem that has been troubling me for nearly 30 years, even though the answer is less exciting than the alternative I suggested."
. . Hawking is expected to publish the detailed paper next month.

July 9, 04: Astronomers have discovered a planet orbiting a star in the constellation Orion —-without ever actually seeing it. They watched the star, about 140 light-years or roughly 800 trillion miles away, and deduced the presence of a planet by how much the star wiggled. It is 123rd planet known beyond the solar system. It was found using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, which uses 91 mirrors, each in the shape of a hexagon, to gather light across a surface 10 meters across.
. . The planet, called HD 37605b, is a gas giant at least 2.8 times the mass of Jupiter. HD 37605b zips around its star — HD 37605, near the bright star Betelgeuse —-once every 54 days.

July 6, 04: A curiously naked white dwarf star, devoid of any perceptible atmosphere, is giving astronomers their first clear look at the nuclear engines that keep stars burning bright. About the size of Earth, the dead star is also the hottest white dwarf ever detected by astronomers -- some 30 times the average temperature of the Sun -- leading them to believe it only recently shut down its nuclear reactor within the last 100 years.
. . Researchers believe the white dwarf, dubbed H1504+65, finished burning its nuclear fuel just a few tens of thousands of years ago, making it the youngest such object on record. The result, they said, is a smoldering stellar relic with a temperature about 200,000 degrees Celsius.
. . A white dwarf is the end result of a star that is not massive enough to end its life in a spectacular explosion called a supernova. But what sets H1504+65 apart is its lack of any hydrogen or helium envelope that normally obscures a white dwarf's nuclear core from astronomers' telescopes. In all other cases to date, at least a thin film of either hydrogen or helium remains to shroud a white dwarf's inner core. "Usually, that little thin film hides everything."
. . Stars typically consume hydrogen gas through the process of nuclear fusion, which generates helium - an element that can be fused even more into carbon and oxygen. As they run out of fuel, these stars become unstable and periodically shed their outer layers until finally, once they've exhausted all of the available fuel, they collapse into white dwarfs. But if a star is massive enough, it may continue to burn its carbon and oxygen stores as well, converting them into magnesium, which apparently occurred in H1504+65, researchers said, adding that the element appears alongside carbon and oxygen in the cooling star remnant.

June 28, 04: A team of astronomers have found a colossal black hole so ancient, they're not sure how it had enough time to grow to its current size, about 10 billion times the mass of the Sun. At the heart of a distant galaxy, the black hole appears to be about 12.7 billion years old, which means it formed just one billion years after the universe began and is one of the oldest supermassive black holes ever known.
. . A supermassive black hole a few million times the mass of the Sun is thought to sit at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, and some of the largest supermassives seen date have reached up to two billion solar masses.
. . The black hole, called a blazar because it spews jets of radiation in roughly the direction of Earth, sits at the center of a galaxy about 12.7 billion light-years away.

June 23, 04: Astronomers have discovered two new molecules in an interstellar cloud of gas and dust near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. The eight-atom molecule propenal and the 10-atom molecule propanal were detected 26,000 light years from Earth.
. . About 130 different molecules, most of them containing a small number of atoms, have been discovered in interstellar clouds. Molecules consisting of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, such as those discovered through the Green Bank observations, are of particular interest to scientists, since they could contain the building blocks for life to begin on a new planet. Complex molecules in space like those detected with the Green Bank Telescope could have been brought to our solar system by comets and could have played a role in the formation of biologically significant molecules on Earth.
. . "The Green Bank Telescope can be used to fully explore the possibility that a significant amount of pre-biotic chemistry may occur in space long before it occurs on a newly formed planet."

June 11, 04: Around 1983, the core of one star ran out of fuel and was no longer able to support itself against its own gravity. It began to collapse. "This collapse is extremely fast, and the core collapses into a neutron star in about one second", Bietenholz explained. "It stops, at least momentarily at this point. If the core winds up with less than about 1.4 times the mass of our Sun, it will remain stable as a neutron star. If the core mass is larger, it will continue to collapse into a black hole, with this further collapse occurring in a fraction of a second."

June 8, 04: Astronomers have found what appears to be a black hole 25 to 40 times the mass of our Sun, a weight class not previously known to exist.
. . Black holes come in two distinct varieties, scientists know. A stellar black hole results from the collapse of a single, massive star and is typically a few times the mass of the Sun. Supermassive black holes anchor the centers of many galaxies and can harbor millions or billions of solar masses.

May, 04: The youngest planet ever detected --a baby less than 1 million years old-- may have been discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The possible infant planet was spotted circling a star known as CoKu Tau 4, some 420 light-years away in the constellation Taurus. This possible planet was detected by examining the dusty disk around the star CoKu Tau 4, where scientists found a donut-like hole in the dust. The putative planet may have formed by scooping together this dust, scientists said.
. . Spitzer also found significant amounts of icy organic material in the dusty disks surrounding other infant stars, which could give a clue to the origins of icy bodies like comets, often described as dusty snowballs in space.
. . This finding is significant because some astronomers believe comets may have brought water to Earth, along with life-enabling materials. These kinds of materials have been detected in space but this is the first time they have been clearly detected in the dust of planet-forming disks.

May, 04: European researchers have found 30 previously hidden supermassive black holes anchoring faraway galaxies, which suggests there at least twice as many of the colossal gravity wells as thought, and possibly by up to a factor of five.
. . If an active galaxy is viewed from above, the hole in the middle of the torus allows a good view of the accretion disk, allowing astronomers to infer the presence of the black hole. The new study looked at galaxies that were edge-on, but deduced the black holes by studying emissions in various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

May 31, 04: Andromeda IX is a mighty dim bulb. In fact, it is dimmest galaxy ever detected, which means it could give clues to the mysterious dark matter that appears to be pushing regular matter around. It's a small satellite of the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor, at a distance of about 2 million light-years. How dim is it? At least twice as faint as the previous record holder, and so diffuse that it appears 100 times dimmer than the night sky. "This raises the question, 'How small can a galaxy actually be?"
. . These little galaxies have never been detected before, but Andromeda IX might be one, and could help uncover more information about how dark matter behaves. Theorists believe dark matter clumped together after the Big Bang quicker than regular matter.
. . These clumps of dark matter are the seeds for the formation of galaxies, but current theories indicate there should be a large number of these dark matter seeds --from about 50 to several hundred of them-- floating around in our cosmic neighborhood without having been absorbed into larger galaxies, Zucker said. "If you have the seed of dark matter with maybe some stars associated with it, you would probably have a little galaxy", he said. "But the problem is that we haven't found these."
. . Andromeda IX might be the first of these mini- galaxies associated with free-floating dark matter, but this has not been confirmed. Astronomers may know more when they train their instruments on several other patches of faint stars in that area of the sky in a few months.
. . Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the universe is expanding. In 1998 they were astounded to learn that it is expanding at an ever-increasing pace. The universe is accelerating. Nobody has a clue what's up, so smart minds invoke dark energy to explain why gravity appears to have turned into a repulsive force. They say this dark energy makes up 73 to 75% of the mass-energy budget of the cosmos.
. . One of astronomers' first tasks in this investigation is to determine whether dark energy's repulsive strength changes over time or not. They're working on it. By using the Hubble Space Telescope to discover distant exploding stars whose light is stretched during travel through time and space, researchers can see what the rate of expansion was when the light left each object.
. . If dark energy's repulsive force decreases in strength with time, the universe might eventually reverse course and collapse. If dark energy gets stronger, things could get way out of hand in the other direction, with all matter --stars, planets, living things and atoms-- being shredded in a Big Rip. Preliminary results show things accelerating at a manageable pace for billions of years to come.
. . The 17th Century astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler wrote an entire book to explain the fundamental reasons why there were six planets at certain distances from each other. The math was fine for its time, and Kepler can be forgiven for not knowing about the other planets yet, but it was the whole premise that was wrong. "He misunderstood the fact that the number of planets and the sizes of their orbits were not fundamental quantities", Livio explained. "They were accidental values for the conditions that happen to be in the disk around the Sun."
. . What's that got to do with dark energy?
. . "It is very possible, though we don't know, that the very peculiar value -- 73% or whatever it is -- of the dark energy is in fact not a fundamental quantity", Livio said. "In order for this to happen, you must have many universes." And, Livio and other cosmologists argue, current theories for how our universe began allow for an infinite number of what he calls "pocket universes", of which we are just one.
. . "The values of some things like the dark energy could be different in different pocket universes", Livio maintains. "But not all of them would allow life. If the value of dark energy in our universe were more than 10 times larger than it is, galaxies would never have formed, and we wouldn't be here to talk about it."

May 26, 04: A pair of hot, young stars, circling each other like boxers looking for an opening, are the new heavyweight champions of the cosmos, astronomers said. Each of the two stars are 80 times heavier than the sun, making them the heaviest stars ever measured. They are both Wolf- Rayet stars, extremely rare hot stars that live fast and die young. They orbit each other every 3.7 days, and they are so close together that each star's gravitational pull distorts the other's shape.
. . The two-star system is located about 20,000 light- years away, & are 2 million to 3 million years old. Our sun is about 4.5 billion years old. In another few million years, whichever one is slightly more massive will undergo core collapse and blast off its outer layers", Bonanos said in a statement. "The companion star likely will survive despite its nearness, at least until it goes supernova sometime later."
. . Other stars are suspected of having enough material to make more than 100 suns, but their masses have not been accurately determined. WR 20a is the most massive known binary system where both stars have precisely determined masses.

May 26, 04: The universe looks like the Eiffel Tower topped with a never-ending spire, a German physicist said. Visualisations are difficult because scientists have mathematical proof the universe has an infinite form but a finite volume. Earlier models, such as one in which the cosmos looks like a huge football, have been widely disputed by physicists.

May 26, 04: A coronagraph would blot out at a star's light in the hopes of seeing small orbiting planets, while the other --an interferometer-- would use a fleet of infrared telescopes working in tandem to hunt for the same extrasolar quarry --earth-like planets around alien stars. But instead of choosing one instrument over the other, NASA has adopted both. "It would be good to get the sensitivity down to half of Earth's size." "It's not that twice as much data is twice as good. It's actually that twice as much data is 10 times as good."
. . A tentative launch date for the coronagraph is expected sometime in 2014. It would use a central disc, as well as other techniques, to blot out a star's glare, allowing the instrument to detect any planets that would otherwise be hard to spot. It calls for a moderate-sized visible light telescope, similar to a 4 by 6 meter mirror currently under study.
. . The second TPF instrument, to launch by the end of 2020, will combine the light from multiple telescopes to make detailed observations of stars and planets. The TPF version is designed to be a free flying fleet of four-meter telescopes that constantly shift themselves to keep the proper orientation.
. . The TPF effort seeks to determine the specific characteristics of any atmosphere present around a planet and develop an understanding of whether the world does or could ever have harbored life.
. . ESA is developing its own formation-flying interferometer mission, dubbed Darwin, to fly in 2014.

May 24, 04: The universe is at least 156 billion light- years wide. In a new study, researchers examined primordial radiation imprinted on the cosmos. Among their conclusions is that it is less likely that there is some crazy cosmic "hall of mirrors" that would cause one object to be visible in two locations. And they've ruled out the idea that we could peer deep into space and time and see our own planet in its youth.
. . Need a visual? Imagine the universe just a million years after it was born, Cornish suggests. A batch of light travels for a year, covering one light-year. "At that time, the universe was about 1,000 times smaller than it is today", he said. "Thus, that one light-year has now stretched to become 1,000 light-years."
. . All the pieces add up to 78 billion-light-years. The light has not traveled that far, but "the starting point of a photon reaching us today after travelling for 13.7 billion years is now 78 billion light-years away", Cornish said. That would be the radius of the universe, and twice that --156 billion light-years-- is the diameter. That's based on a view going 90% of the way back in time, so it might be slightly larger.
. . (You might have heard the universe is almost surely flat, not spherical. The flatness refers to its geometry being "normal", like what is taught in school; two parallel lines can never cross.)
. . The findings have shown "no sign that the universe is finite, but that doesn't prove that it is infinite." "If the universe was finite, and had a size of about 4 billion to 5 billion light-years, then light would be able to wrap around the universe, and with a big enough telescope we could view the Earth just after it solidified and when the first life formed", Cornish said. "Unfortunately, our results rule out this tantalizing possibility."

May 21, 04: A new twist on an emerging theory says the Sun was born amid massive, short-lived stars that sculpted our solar system with intense radiation and violent explosions that may have affected the origin of life.
. . The fresh analysis pulls together several lines of evidence suggesting that the Sun did not form in isolation, as astronomers once thought. Instead, it emerged from the edge of a cloud of chaos.
. . The latest evidence for a chaotic birthplace comes from meteorites that have landed on Earth after orbiting the Sun for billions of years. The rocks contain chemical patterns that can only be created by the radioactive decay of an isotope of iron called iron-60. The iron-60 must have been present in the early solar system but has since decayed into telltale nickel-60 in the meteorites. "Iron-60 can only be created in a supernova and so there is no room for debate about where it formed." That implies the Sun must have been near a massive star when it formed about 4.6 billion years ago.
. . "Now that we know the orbits of all the stars, we can see that many nearby stars come from far away and are just transiting near us now", said Johannes Andersen, also of the Niels Bohr Institute.

May 10, 04: In a preliminary analysis of new data, astronomers say they may have imaged a planet outside our solar system for the first time by using a tricky new method to ferret out dim objects from the light of a star. The researchers are very cautious not to claim any discovery yet. The faint point of light, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, might instead be a background star or a very distant galaxy and requires follow-up observations to be confirmed.
. . They say there is a high probability the object is a planet, however. If so, it would not resemble anything in our solar system. Each of the newly spotted objects and its corresponding white dwarf are separated by more than the distance from Neptune to the Sun. The possible planet is huge, something less than 10 times as massive as Jupiter. It orbits a white dwarf star. The object is one of three planet candidates found in the new study around white dwarf stars between 30 and 55 light- years away. The other two candidates appear to be even more massive, about 15-20 times as heavy as Jupiter. That would put them at the boundary between massive planets and failed stars known as brown dwarfs. Stellar pairs and even triplets are common, so astronomers would not be surprised to find a brown dwarf circling a white dwarf.
. . A firm answer could come later this year with one more snapshot of each candidate that would show whether it moves across the sky with its presumed host star.
. . The observations were made with Hubble's infrared NICMOS camera. The infrared light from the presumed planets is not reflected light from the host stars but instead represents heat emitted by the giant worlds.

May 5, 04: A 50-year-old map of the Milky Way will have to be redrawn after Australian astronomers made the astonishing discovery that our spiral galaxy has a huge, outflung arm. The vast gassy limb comprises an arc of hydrogen 77,000 light years long and several thousand light years thick, running along the Milky Way's outermost edge and sweeping around the four main arms that swirl out. It is not in the visible part of the light spectrum.

Apr 15, 04: Separate teams today announced the discoveries of three planets outside our solar system, including one that is more than three times farther away than the previous record holder. Tricks used to find the giant worlds are expected to also allow detection of Earth-sized planets by the end of the decade.
. . Previously, the most distant known planet was 5,000 light-years away. One of the newly spotted worlds and its host star are 17,000 light-years distant. They inhabit a crowded region of space toward the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. The far-off planet is estimated to be about 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter and presumed to be similarly gaseous. It orbits the star about three times farther than Earth is from the Sun.
. . The discovery involved a trick of light called gravitational microlensing. Planet hunters have been eager for years to prove it could work, and they expect it will soon enable discoveries of smaller planets. The combined gravity of the newfound planet and its host star act like a lens, focusing light from a more distant star that is 24,000 light-years away in an effect predicted by Albert Einstein. This technique could detect a planet as small as Earth, but it could take five years to perfect the method to that level of sensitivity.
. . Microlensing is now one of three proven indirect methods. Unlike other methods, the lensing cannot be repeated because the chance alignment never occurs again.

Apr 6, 04: If NASA stands firm on its decision to let the Hubble Space Telescope die in about 2007, scientists will lose among other things their only tool for studying ultraviolet (UV) light coming from all corners of the cosmos. To fill the need, astronomers around the world are advocating the construction of a World Space Observatory they say could launch by 2009.
. . The proposed new observatory would not only be more capable than Hubble in the UV arena but would represent a whole new approach to big-time astronomy. The effort involves countries large and small trying to cobble together enough money to build the first truly global space telescope.
. . The WSO would not make visible-light or infrared images, as Hubble does. NASA's replacement for Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, will launch no sooner than 2011 and capture only infrared light.
. . Construction on the WSO has not begun and funding is not secured, so its future is uncertain. In fact, the funding challenge will be as unorthodox and multi-pronged as the many member nations implies. Proposals have been submitted to funding agencies at several of the countries involved.
. . The WSO would be a boon to UV astronomers. Because Hubble multitasks across infrared, visible and UV, only about one-third of its time is allocated for UV observations with, Kappelmann said, 10 times more requests for observing time being submitted than are accepted. Not only would WSO be UV-only, it would be five to 10 times more sensitive than Hubble.

Apr 6, 04: A new survey of stars near the Sun reveals a wild and crazy past in which wanderers arrived from all directions under the gravitational influences of black holes, clouds of gas, and invading galaxies.
. . European astronomers spent 15 years making 1001 nights of observations to detail the motions of more than 14,000 stars that are currently in the solar neighborhood. While astronomers expected the early history of the Milky Way was quite chaotic, most had believed "that it since had been rather calm. But this turns out not to be true. Stars have been perturbed all the time throughout the Milky Way history."
. . Most are born in circular orbits, but when they encounter other objects, they can change course and speed up. But what did the stirring, giving each star a different trajectory and speed?
1. The Milky Way's own spiral arms, which are denser than the relative voids in between
2. Smaller galaxies falling into the Milky Way and being consumed
3. Giant clouds of gas falling through the galaxy
4. Black holes

. . Some theorists believe the Sun formed within a dense cluster of stars and was later gravitationally kicked out to its current, less dense surroundings. Most stars are born in such clusters.
. . The survey does not reveal the Sun's birthplace, but it offers some clues to the past. An animation shows the stars' movements in relation to the Sun projected back through the past 250 million years, or about the time it took the Sun to make its most recent trip around the center of the galaxy. "The Sun has made some 20 laps around the galactic center since it was born, and its 'sisters and brothers' have dispersed long ago."
. . In addition, about one-third of the stars were found to have one or more stellar companions, a ratio that does not surprise astronomers.

Apr 1, 04: Astronomers using the Anglo-Australian telescope in outback Australia announced the discovery of more than 40 previously unknown "dwarf" galaxies in a constellation "on Earth's doorstep". Ultra Compact Dwarfs have masses similar to those of previously known dwarf galaxies, they are much smaller --about 120 light years across. "Tens of millions of stars are squashed into what is a tiny volume by galaxy standards. It's likely that at least some are left-over examples of the primordial building blocks that formed large galaxies by merging together."
. . They're so small they looked like stars, hidden in the nearby Fornax cluster of galaxies, 60 million light- years away. The scientists believe the UCDs are the nuclei of galaxies that were originally larger but have been stripped of their outer stars.

Apr 1, 04: Dozens of stars that are known to have planetary systems could have a planet like Earth, British astronomers say. So far, skywatchers have identified 105 planetary systems around other stars in the Milky Way, thanks to a "wobble" in the star's motion. Astronomers at Britain's Open University have taken a stab at it, and believe that as many as half of the known systems may have another Earth.
. . The team drew up a computer model of nine known exoplanet systems and injected an "Earth". In some planetary systems, the proximity of one or more Jupiter- like planets caused the putative "Earth" to be kicked out of the habitable zone, so that it froze or roasted. But in others, the planet was moved to a "safe haven" in the habitable zone, or was not significantly troubled. [the so- called Goldilocks zone: not too hot, not too cold, just right.]
. . The models show that life could develop at some time in about two-thirds of the systems. If a second Earth is ever detected, its typical expected distance would be 20,000 light years.

Mar 22, 04: Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen has donated $13.5 million to help fund the search for extraterrestrial life. The California-based SETI Institute, which is dedicated to the search for life beyond Earth, said the donation would be used to create a radio telescope array of more than 200 satellite dishes that will measure signals from space. SETI, which stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, plans ultimately to increase the array to a total of 350 satellite dishes.

Mar 9, 04: Scientists unveiled a monster baby picture of the universe, in an image snapped by the Hubble Space Telescope that looks deep into the cosmos, back 13 billion years to just 700 million years after the Big Bang. It is some 10,000 galaxies crammed into a section of sky about one-tenth the size of the full moon.
. . Even a seemingly slight increase in the depth of observation is a giant leap for basic study of the cosmos. The quality of the image is so fine that galaxies billions of miles away show features that scientists formerly had seen only in galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood. It's four times better than even Hubble's last faraway looks.
. . These early galaxies are shown to be more chaotic, to interact more with each other and to be less well-formed than our own Milky Way. "...this is a time when a phase transition occurred in the universe ... this is a very critical time, you want to have details on that critical time", Hubble astronomer Mario Livio said.
. . They noted this could be the last such image made by Hubble. NASA has decided to forego a scheduled servicing mission for the telescope, which means its gyroscopes and battery could doom it to an early demise.
. . It includes ancient galaxies that emerged just 700 million years after the Big Bang from what astronomers call the "dark ages".
. . The image is about one-tenth the diameter of the full moon and took Hubble one million seconds to take. To cover the entire sky with such detail would take the HST one million years.
. . The HUDF is the result of two separate exposures, one taken by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the other by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-object Spectrometer (NICMOS). By combining the two, astronomers can search for galaxies that existed between 800 and 400 million years after the Big Bang. But it's the NICMOS instrument that will reveal the farthest galaxies ever seen, because only it can detect light stretched past the visible, which is ACS territory, far into the near-infrared spectrum. There's even a good case that it contains ancient galaxies of red shift 12, which would place them about 300 million years after the Big Bang.
. . Photons of light from the very faintest objects arrived at a trickle of one photon per minute, as opposed to millions of photons per minute from nearer galaxies.

See Black Holes: Fuzzy Tangles of Strings?)

Feb 25, 04: A star only 33 light years away may be giving birth to new planets, and we are close enough to see it happen, U.S. astronomers said. They have seen evidence of a disk of dust orbiting the star --a disk like the one the solar system is believed to have formed from. And within the disk is a clear swath, which suggests a planet has started to form and has scooped up some of the dust in the process.
. . The star, called AU Microscopium or AU Mic, is dimmer and redder than our own Sun, so any planets orbiting it are likely to be cold. 33 light-years is close enough to let scientists try to see the star better using the Hubble Space Telescope or ground-based telescopes. AU Mic is extremely young --just about 12 million years old compared to our own Sun's age of 4.6 billion years.

Feb 22, 04: Cosmologists had a bit of good news --they are just about twice as certain as they were before that the Universe is not going to be ripped apart. But if we really want to know what will happen, the United States must continue to care for the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, or build a replacement soon, the researchers said.
. . The mysterious "dark energy" that is pushing apart the universe appears to be the constant force that Albert Einstein once predicted, according to measurements made by the Hubble Space Telescope.
. . The force is an unknown form of energy that behaves in an opposite manner from the pull of gravity. Dark energy causes the galaxies within the universe to move apart from one another at ever-increasing speeds.
. . Einstein called the force the "cosmological constant." He theorized its existence to balance the universe against normal gravity and keep it from collapsing on itself. Einstein ultimately dismissed the theory as his greatest blunder, but subsequent observations of supernovas, or distant stars that exploded long ago, gave it credence. Scientists now know dark energy causes the universe to expand and accelerate. It makes up an estimated 70% of the universe.
. . What was unclear is whether dark energy is stable. If it grows stronger with time, the universe could end with galaxies, stars, planets and, ultimately, atoms coming unglued in a violent expansion that theorists call the "big rip."
. . In the alternative, dark energy could fade away to the point where it flipped in force, pulling the universe back together in what's called the "big crunch."
. . These Hubble observations suggest dark energy is unwavering, just as Einstein predicted.

Feb 16, 04: In a discovery that offers a rare glimpse back to when the universe was just 750 million years old, a team of astrophysicists said they have detected a tiny galaxy that is the farthest known object from Earth. It lies roughly 13 billion light-years away. The Big Bang was 13.7 billion years ago.
. . They were aided by the natural magnification of 25 provided by a massive cluster of galaxies. The gravitational tug of the cluster, called Abell 2218, deflects the light of the distant galaxy and magnifies it many times over. That process, first proposed by Albert Einstein and known as "gravitational lensing", produces double images of the galaxy.
. . The galaxy is just 2,000 light-years across. That's far smaller than the Milky Way, which is roughly 100,000 light-years in diameter.

Feb 13, 04: BPM 37093. The heart of that burned-out star with the no-nonsense name is a sparkling diamond that weighs a staggering 10 billion trillion trillion carats. That's one followed by 34 zeros. The hunk of celestial bling is an estimated 2,500 miles across, said Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
. . "You would need a jeweler's loupe the size of the sun to grade this diamond", said Metcalfe, who led the team that discovered the gem.
. . The diamond is a massive chunk of crystallized carbon that lies about 300 trillion miles from Earth, in the constellation Centaurus. The galaxy's largest diamond is formally known as a white dwarf, or the hot core of a dead sun. Astronomers have suspected for decades that white dwarfs crystallized, but only recently were able to verify the hypothesis.

Feb 2, 04: The Hubble Space Telescope has detected oxygen and carbon in the atmosphere of a distant planet --the first time these elements have been found around a world outside the solar system, but unlike Earth, the planet is a hot, gassy orb very close to its sun-like star, and due to extreme heat, the oxygen and carbon are not signs of any sort of life.
. . Still, Hubble's findings show that the chemical composition of atmospheres of planets many light-years away can be measured.
. . The planet --known as HD 209458b or Osiris-- is orbiting a star 150 light-years from Earth. It's only 4.3 million miles from its star --compared with Earth's 93 million miles from the sun-- and whips around in an orbit of less than four days. It belongs to a class of planets called "hot Jupiters", whose upper atmosphere is so hot it boils hydrogen off into space.

Gamma ray bursts, or GRBs, are the most powerful explosions in the universe, although much of their origin remains a mystery to astronomers. They can last up to a few minutes or less than a second, and while some occur in tandem with a supernova explosion, only those stars capable of collapsing into a black hole seem to be able to make a GRB.

Jan 19, 04: Astronomers have long held what they call a hierarchical view of the universe in which dark matter -- invisible stuff up that makes up 90% of the material in the universe-- collected in clumps, attracting the interstellar gas that formed the first stars about 200 million years after the Big Bang. Those stars collected into galaxies, which themselves grouped into clusters and later giant galactic strings.
. . Some theorists have likened the setup to a spider web, with water drops representing normal matter and sliding toward nodes of the web.

Jan 7, 04: Stars heat planets: that's the astronomical rule. But a big gassy planet in the constellation Sagittarius is warming the star it orbits, just the opposite of what happens between Earth and the sun, scientists said.
. . The hot spot on the star might have been mistaken for a sun spot, except that it is moving at the pace of the planet's orbit, rather than at the speed the star is rotating.
. . "This is the first glimpse of a magnetic field on an extrasolar planet." This magnetic field is what seems to be causing the spot warming on the star, which is some 90 light-years away. It's almost as big as Jupiter. The planet is nestled very close to its star, only 4.35 million miles or so.
. . These hot planets account for about 20% of the more than 100 planets outside our solar system identified so far. This one is apparently causing a giant magnetic storm on its star, producing a persistent hot spot that keeps pace with the planet in its three-day orbit around the star. The hot spot has been seen for more than a year, or more than 100 orbits.
. . The traveling hot spot is probably caused by an interaction between the planet's magnetic field and the star's chromosphere, a thin, hot layer above its visible surface.

Studies indicate the Milky Way is headed for an eventual collision with the Andromeda Galaxy, another large spiral. Computer models indicate that crash will result in a merger of the two galaxies.

Jan 7, 04: The first stars after the Big Bang were immense, superhot giants that lived briefly and then exploded as brilliant supernovae, but they seeded the universe with basic elements that were the building blocks for the sun and the Earth, and for life itself, according to a new study. After just a few million years, they collapsed and exploded as supernovae. In that violence were created the heavier elements "that completely changed the universe.
. . "The window for life opened sometime between 500 and 2 billion years after Big Bang."
. . More than 100 extra-solar planets have been discovered. All of these planets orbit stars that are rich in heavy metals, supporting the idea that stars with heavy elements are more likely to have families of planets.

Jan 6, 04: A team of researchers has found what appears to be the most luminous known star --one so massive that it shouldn't have formed in the first place. It should have destroyed itself before it even ignited. Astronomers long believed that as young stars grew to 120 solar masses, their energy output would burn off any excess. That is, the heat and pressure within the still-forming star would be so great, it would shear off any additional material from the star's surface. [light can push!]
. . LBV 1806-20 tips the scales of stellar masses at about 150 times the heft of the Sun. It shines up to 40 million times brighter than Sol. It sits about 45,000 light- years away, on the other side of the Milky Way, and is almost completely obstructed by interstellar gas and dust.
. . "These types of stars only run a short, violent, time, about two million years. They tend to erupt and do really bad things to themselves before they blow themselves to bits."

Jan 5, 04: Astronomers have captured images of the oldest and most distant galactic clusters ever seen, a discovery that shows immense numbers of stars formed less than 2 billion years after the birth of the cosmos. The finding, to be presented this week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, suggests that the raw materials needed to create life may have formed far earlier than astronomers once believed. "Then it is also true that life could have formed very early." "The stars in these galaxies are likely to be the second generation of stars", said Postman.
. . This suggests that even at an early moment in time, millions of stars already gone through their life cycle, forming, burning out, exploding and spewing into space the basic heavy elements, such as carbon and oxygen, needed for the formation of life.

There are roughly 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. At most, 8,479 of them are visible from Earth to someone with perfect vision under ideal conditions. Not all these stars can be seen from any one location, of course. Roughly 2,500 stars are available to the unaided eye in ideal conditions from a single spot at a given time. In New York, for example, as few as two dozen stars dot the dome of night.

Jan 2, 04: Australian astronomers say have pinpointed an area of the Milky Way that is most likely to support alien life. "Many, many hundreds of those stars which you could look up and see with the naked eye, most of which are actually very close, would potentially have terrestrial planets similar to the earth and Mars and Venus."
. . Gibson said the habitable zone appeared about eight billion years ago but had since accumulated heavy elements like carbon, oxygen and iron. "Perhaps there's no life out there", Lineweaver said. "But if there is life, we've determined where you are most likely to find it."

Dec 18, 03: NASA unveiled the first views from its space infrared telescope, a super-cooled orbiting observatory that can look through obscuring dust to capture images never before seen --that had been blocked from the view of conventional telescopes by dense clouds of dust and gas.
. . Some of the first views from the Spitzer included:
. . _a galaxy that was mostly blurred in the view of other telescopes. In the Spitzer image, there are vast fields of stars in a spiral necklace surrounding the galaxy. The image also detects clouds of glowing carbon dust. Now it's seen as a highly energetic galaxy, glowing with an energy 1,000 times that of the Milky Way.
. . The telescope completes NASA's original plan to orbit telescopes to study segments of the electromagnetic spectrum, the visible and invisible radiation that fills the universe, which is partially or completely blocked by the Earth's atmosphere
. . The Hubble, launched in 1990, gathers images in visible, ultraviolet and near-infrared waves. The Compton, launched in 1991, studied gamma rays, a high energy form of radiation. Its mission ended in 1999. The Chandra Observatory, launched in 1999, studies X-ray radiation from supernovas and black holes. Now the Spitzer collects infrared.

Dec, 03: Preliminary calculations indicate that a probe could be sent to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, actually a triple star system, in 40 years using only a few grams of antimatter. To send one pound of mass there means that the energy contained in 45 kilotons of high explosive has to be expended to get the payload "pound" up to speed. So the development of very small payloads and ultra-light propulsion systems is essential.
. . NASA's Kepler mission is scheduled to launch in 2007. It will determine the frequency of terrestrial and larger planets in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of spectral types of stars. Kepler is specially geared to continuously examine a region of space containing 100,000 stars. It will see if Earth-sized planets make a transit across any of the stars.
. . NASA's Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is headed for launch in 2009, assigned the job of determining the positions and distances of stars several hundred times more accurately than any previous observations. This accuracy will allow SIM to look for the positional (astrometric) wobble of nearby stars induced by orbiting planets. In some cases, planets as small as a few Earth masses should be detectable.
. . With an anticipated launch between 2012-2015, TPF (Terrestrial Planet finder) will be capable of detecting and characterizing Earth-like planets around as many as 150 stars up to 45 light-years away. TPF is slated to make 5 years of observations to detect the atmospheric signatures of habitable or even inhabited planets.
. . The European Space Agency (ESA) has selected the InfraRed Space Interferometer --better known as Darwin-- as a mission for its Horizons 2000 program. Selection of a launch date, probably in the 2014-2015 time frame, will be made on cost, science and technology grounds sometime before then, according to ESA. As now envisioned, Darwin will use a flotilla of six space telescopes. Working together, the telescopes are to look for signs of life on Earth-like planets.
. . Antimatter could provide enough energy to make fast interstellar treks possible. But it's incredibly expensive to make and we don't know how to store it or use it efficiently for thrust. One approach is to collect propellant as you go. Unfortunately, collecting interstellar hydrogen doesn't seem to work. It's not dense enough, and efforts to design magnetic 'scoops' have shown that it's hard to gather hydrogen in flight. In fact, magnetic scoops work better as drag brakes for slowing down than they do as part of a propulsion system for speeding up."
. . But the best way to do interstellar propulsion seems to be to use beamed momentum --use the pressure of a laser beam or microwave beam to accelerate a reflective "sail" up to high velocity. At the far end, a magnetic drag brake can be used to slow down. Launching a one-ton probe to another star with SailBeam would take many gigawatts of laser power for several years.
. . "But it doesn't take any new physics, and the technologies required are only modest extrapolations from what we can do now. My very rough guess is we could start building a SailBeam launcher in 20-30 years, and be launching probes by 2050", he said. What's needed is rocketry that can recycle its propellant, commonly referred to as propellantless or field-propulsion. "This new physics requires a new understanding of the Cosmos that will allow us to manipulate spacetime in such a way that field propulsion becomes possible and Star Trek-like 'warp bubbles' become doable."

Dec 9, 03: A team of astronomers at the UK's Royal Observatory say clumps of dust in Vega's disk-like ring can best be explained by a Neptune-sized planet orbiting Vega at about twice the distance Neptune is from our Sun. That configuration, the researchers say, allows plenty of room for rocky planets like Earth to develop closer to the star.
. . It is young, just 350 million years old compared to our Sun, which is 4.6 billion years old.
. . Fomalhaut, also nearby and the 17th brightest star in our sky, appears to have a Saturn-sized planet and also looks like an early version of our solar system.

Nov 4, 03: A small galaxy has just been detected as it is being ripped apart and swallowed by the much larger Milky Way. The Canis Major dwarf galaxy, as it is now called, is closer to the center of our galaxy than any previously known. It may add 1% more mass to the Milky Way --only about one billion Suns.
. . The discovery, announced today by an international team of astronomers, is further evidence that the Milky Way has built its bulk by mergers and acquisitions. Canis Major dwarf is, on average, about 25,000 light-years from our solar system and some 42,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way. This is closer than the previous leader in proximity, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, discovered in 1994. The new galaxy does not look like the Milky Way. Besides containing far fewer stars, it is stretched into a sort of ring around the Milky Way --a clue to how its being torn apart and swallowed up.
. . Astronomers found it by detecting several cool, red stars that are otherwise rare in the Milky Way.

Oct 8, 03: A team of astrophysicists have taken a kick at the conventional view that the Universe is flat and endless, suggesting instead that the cosmos is shaped like... a football (soccer).
. . The study is based on a reading of temperature fluctuations at the extreme range of the microwave scale, recorded across the sky. These fluctuations do not fit in with the "Standard Model" of a flat, always expanding Universe. "In an infinite flat space, waves from the Big Bang would fill the Universe on all length scales" in the microwave band, they argue. They suggest that only a "dodecahedral" --the posh word for a 12-sided shape-- could contain this kind of energy release.
. . The data suggest the universe is finite and made of curved pentagons joined together into a rough ball. Scientists said data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe, which maps background radiation left over from the Big Bang, are not consistent with an infinite universe.

The Milky Way's central black hole is about 26,000 light- years away. Other black holes, only as massive as a handful of stars, exist throughout the galaxy.

Sept 24, 03: Our Milky Way galaxy is gobbling up its galactic neighbor, Sagittarius, and on Wednesday, scientists offered documentary proof of this continuing cosmic cannibalism. Astronomers have mapped the Sagittarius galaxy to show in detail how its debris wraps around and passes through the Milky Way. The dwarf Sagittarius -- which is about 1/10,000 the mass of the Milky Way --is getting stretched, torn apart and ultimately eaten.
. . It had been obscured by stars and cosmic dust, but was revealed when astronomers looked for infrared radiation coming from stars known as M giants, which are common in Sagittarius but rare in the outer reaches of the Milky Way. Even the existence of Sagittarius was unknown until its center was discovered in 1994.

Aug 3, 03: Astronomers have long known that we're all made of stardust. Now they've gotten an enlightening glimpse into one of the explosive events that loads the universe with the dusty seeds of life.
. . Researchers re-examined the remnant of an exploded star and found a thousand times more smoke-like dust particles than had been detected before. The finding helps explain why galaxies are dust-laden almost to the beginning of time, astronomers said. SCUBA detected a dust shell in Cassiopeia A that contains up to four times the mass of the Sun. "This is over a thousand times what's been seen before."

July 30, 03: A group of research organizations are hoping to build a new telescope that might just do the trick --to find dark matter and dark energy, unseen phenomena whose existence can be inferred --if not seen directly-- though other observations.
. . The repetitiveness of LSST's sky surveys will also come in handy for asteroid-hunters who hope to chart rogue space rocks before they pose a danger to Earth. Researchers expect the instrument to be able to image up to 10,000 trans-Neptunian objects and 100,000 previously unknown supernovae each year.
. . Current LSST designs call for an 8.4-meter telescope, which wouldn't make it the largest telescope ever made (the 10-meter telescopes at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii have that title) but size isn't what project researchers are after.
. . A crucial decision lies in whether LSST's imaging system would use established CCD chips or the younger Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology.
. . Project scientists are looking at regions of northern Chile, the Western deserts in the United States and Baja California, though a final location will be decided in upcoming months. A final LSST design should be in hand by later this fall.

July 17, 03: Clusters of old stars not large enough to be considered galaxies have been found wandering through otherwise sparse regions between galaxies. Most were probably kicked out of their former homes by violent galactic interactions Our own Milky Way Galaxy is surrounded by about 150 globular clusters, all gravitationally bound to the larger host. Untold others have been consumed and integrated into the galaxy through time.
. . The newfound clusters, so dim they stretch the capabilities of the world's greatest telescopes, are about 400 million light-years from Earth.

July 17, 03: Supernovae, powerful and violent explosions of stars at the end of their lives, hold the key to a 10 billion-year-old mystery --the origins of cosmic dust, astronomers said. Scientists long believed that cosmic dust, the fine solid particles in space that are the building blocks of planets, was made in relatively cool, slow-burning normal stars and released in a stellar wind. But astronomers in England and Wales say they have discovered that some supernovae spew out huge amounts of dust, suggesting they are the source of the first cosmic particles in the Universe.
. . Cosmic dust consists of particles about as small as those in cigarette smoke.

July 11, 03: Astronomers have discovered the oldest known planet, a primeval world 12.7 billion years old that will force them to reconsider how and when planets form. At 7,200 light-years from Earth, it is not just the oldest known planet but also the farthest. The discovery raises the prospect that life may have begun far sooner than most scientists ever imagined.
. . The planet is at least as big as Jupiter --perhaps 2.5 times the mass. It's not visible either -- its existence is inferred. Researchers believe the planet, like Jupiter, is a gas giant, unable to support life because it lacks sufficient amounts of carbon and oxygen. Back when it formed, there would have been less rock --the stuff of a terrestrial planet-- because heavier elements form with subsequent generations of stars. The planet also has survived the blistering ultraviolet radiation, supernova radiation, and shockwaves from the birth and death of the stars in the cluster around it, NASA said.
. . It's had an incredibly wild ride through time. It's in the globular cluster M4. The world formed when the universe was just a billion years old. The next 10 billion years were fairly routine. Then the planet was booted from its stellar orbit and captured by the gravity of another star that was well into its death throes.
. . About two or three billion years ago, as the yellow star and its planet were plunging into the crowded core of M4, they passed near a collapsed, dense and dying neutron star, an object that resulted from some previous explosion of a very massive star. The neutron star had an orbiting companion star. The gravitational tug-of-war that ensued booted the neutron star's companion into space. But the neutron star, a weighty competitor, captured the yellow sun-like star and its planet.
. . The sun-like star aged, bloating into a red giant (our Sun will do the same one day). The red giant's gas flowed onto the neutron star, energizing it. The neutron star spun faster. Today, it rotates on its axis 100 times every second and is known as a pulsar. Meanwhile, the red giant's fuel was exhausted and it turned into a cool, fairly dim white dwarf.
. . It now orbits both the white dwarf and the neutron star. It goes around them at a distance that is most likely similar to Uranus' distance from the Sun. The planet's orbit is about 100 years long.

May 29, 03: The Solar system is thought to reside in a huge cavity, riddled with pockets and tunnels all carved out by exploded stars, long ago.
. . It's called the Local Bubble, said to surround the Sun and nearby stars. The study shows that the hole of sorts --in which there are fewer hydrogen atoms than outside the hole-- is far from spherical in dimension. It's more like the internal structure of a sponge. The nearest wall is less than 200 light-years away.
. . A NASA satellite, called CHIPS, launched in Dec 02, is designed to map hydrogen in the local universe. That effort is expected to yield more detail on it.
. . "In several directions in the galaxy, our local cavity seems to be linked with other similar empty regions by pathways or tunnels in the interstellar medium." The theory called for supernovae to create rapidly expanding bubbles of hot gas that would collide with colder gas in the surrounding medium. Cold shells would form. These shells would later interact with other expanding hot shells, then break apart to form the tunnels.
. . The astronomers aim to find out if the nearest wall is moving toward us or away. [What's the effect if we hit it?!] The discovery will be detailed in the Oct. 20 issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

May 29, 03: There are three planets [known so far] beyond the solar system about the same size as Earth. Found more than a decade ago, you might not have heard about them, as their discovery was clouded in controversy. But today the dispute is over, the planets are still there, and astronomers have pinned down their sizes with much more precision. One of the planets is 4.3 times as massive as Earth and another is three times as heavy, give or take five%.
. . Measurements of the third planet are less firm, but it appears to be about twice as massive as the Moon --significantly less than Earth. The outer planet of the threesome goes around the star in just 98 days.
. . The planets are dead worlds, orbiting a dying star where there is no chance for anything interesting to happen, biologically. Because of this, most planet hunters have shown little interest in them. In fact, it is common for these worlds to be ignored when researchers make lists of known planets. It is seldom mentioned that they were indeed the first-ever extra-solar planets ever discovered.
. . The roughly Earth-sized planets orbit a neutron star, a dense stellar corpse that's just a hop, skip and a jump from a black hole, density-wise.

July 2, 03: Reckless pulsars --spinning searchlights in space-- might tear themselves apart if they whirled too fast, but ripples in the cosmic fabric first predicted by Albert Einstein may set a celestial speed limit. That limit is still extremely high, about 760 revolutions per second, astronomers said.
. . But scientists figure some of the fastest pulsars could technically go two or three times that speed. Unfortunately, they would inevitably disintegrate if they did. What stops them is the phenomenon predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity --the rippling of the fabric of space and time. Known to scientists as gravitational radiation, these ripples are a bit like waves on an ocean and are produced by massive objects in motion. They have never been directly detected.
. . Created when a star explodes, most pulsars start spinning perhaps 30 times a second and slow down over millions of years. But a dense pulsar can waltz in space with a companion star, siphoning material from its companion, which makes it spin much faster, up to hundreds of times a second.
. . The faster a pulsar spins, some scientists believe, the more gravitational radiation it might release, and as that happens, the pulsar's spherical shape is ever so slightly deformed. That deformity might act as a brake on the pulsar's spin rate. That distortion is extremely small, measuring only a very small fraction of an atom.

July 3, 03: Astronomers searching for signs of a Solar- type System said they had found a planet very similar to Jupiter orbiting a star resembling the Sun, 90 light years away. With a mass twice that of gas giant Jupiter, the planet circles star HD70642 once every six years. In relation to its own distance from its star, if it were in the Solar System, it would be about half way between Mars and Jupiter.

June 31, 03: The radio telescope at Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory, powerful enough to "hear" planets forming several billion light years away, will receive six more radio receivers to expand its range, scientists said. Once the upgrade, nicknamed the ALFA Project, is completed next year, the observatory's staff of 15 scientists will take on the arduous task of mapping the night sky for future generations. The map, with its collection of detailed data about location, identity and properties of what is in space will go far beyond anything currently in use.

Telescopes known as the Keck Interferometer form the equivalent of a 279-foot telescope, and comprise the world's largest optical telescope system. Each telescope gathers light waves and combines them so they interact, or "interfere" with each other to simulate a much larger, more powerful device.

June 16, 03: It might seem hard enough to swallow that most of the universe's matter is a kind we can't see and don't understand. But scientists have to go a step further and suggest that some of this "dark matter" is hot and some is cold.
. . Now a new study shows that about 80% of dark matter is the cold variety. At the center of the studied galaxy cluster is an enormous, elliptically shaped galaxy thought to have been formed from the mergers of many smaller galaxies. The X-ray data show that the density of dark matter increases smoothly all the way into the center of the cluster.

Black Holes: scientists have long theorized that they come in two main flavors.
. . The supermassive variety develops along with a galaxy and resides at its center, most astronomers figure. Despite incredible mass, each supermassive black hole makes up less than 1% of its host galaxy's mass. The other type, stellar black holes, are no more massive than a few hundred suns. Most are less than a dozen times as massive as the Sun. Each is thought to form via the collapse of a dying star.

May 29, 03: A team of international scientists revealed they had discovered the tiniest galaxies in the universe, so small they were previously mistaken for stars. Drinkwater said the seven UCDs his team found each contained only about 10 million stars, while the Milky Way had about 10 billion. (1/1000th)
. . What previous astronomers had assumed to be relatively close stars, actually turned out to be UCDs 60 million light years away, nestled among 300 other galaxies in an area of the universe known as the Fornax Cluster.
. . Astrophysicists believe the UCDs were originally larger but lost portions of their mass to the gravitational pull of larger galaxies. "What is left is a tiny core all on its own after the surrounding stars have been ripped off." Scientists now hope to explore other areas of the universe for more UCDs.

May 29, 03: For decades, researchers have searched for the cause of incredible explosions from deep space called gamma ray bursts. Investigations into two such recent events have managed to rule out one theoretical model and provide support for another, while also hinting at the mechanism behind the bursts.
. . Gamma ray bursts (GRBs) shine briefly with the intensity of a million trillion suns. One or two a day go off, scattered throughout the cosmos.
. . GRBs are almost surely caused by supernovae, explosive collapses of the most massive stars, which end up forming black holes or dense neutron stars. A beam of energy shoots out along the axis of the star's rotation, theory holds. If that beam is aimed at Earth, then a GRB can be recorded.
. . But the specific mechanism for triggering the immense release of energy is not known.

May 20, 03: Astronomers have stumbled onto a previously unknown star in Earth's stellar neighborhood, a red dwarf that appears to be the third-closest star system to our own. It's 7.8 light years away, & shines about 300,000 times fainter than Sol.
. . The closest star to Earth is Alpha Centauri, which is actually a set of triplets burning brightly about four light years away. Barnard's Star, the next-nearest neighbor is a slightly further hop at about six light years form Earth. [I count that the new star is the *5th* closest, tho the 3rd *system.]

Apr 30, 03: Sifting through ashes of the first stars, astronomers have found significant amounts of iron, which dates the initial stellar furnaces to as early as 200 million years after the universe was born. The findings push stellar origins back to an earlier epoch than scientists thought just a few months ago.
. . Researchers do not understand how the first stars and their associated galaxies formed so rapidly. The new findings won't directly help unravel that mystery, but they pin down the time frame beyond dispute.
. . It and all other elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were forged in stars, chemical factories that produce successively heavier elements, from nitrogen to carbon and finally iron.
. . The age [& greatest distance] of the universe: 13.7 billion years. The WMAP findings also put the birth of the first stars at about 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Scientists may have solved one of astronomy's major puzzles --the origin of powerful gamma-ray bursts. About once a day, a flash of high energy radiation coming from deep space and lasting only a few seconds is detected by satellite observatories orbiting the Earth. The enormous power of the energy bursts has long mystified astronomers. Now, thanks to a burster that was remarkably close in cosmic terms, their true nature may have been revealed. The bursts seem to come from exploding stars called supernovae.
. . March 29th, the High-Energy Transient Explorer satellite (Hete) detected one of the brightest and closest gamma-ray bursts ever seen --two billion light-years from Earth. The 30-second burst outshone the entire Universe in gamma rays. Its optical afterglow was still over a trillion times brighter than the Sun over two hours later.

Apr 17, 03: "[It] is fortuitous that GRBs [gamma ray bursts] almost always come from outside the Milky Way Galaxy. The radiation from such an event, were it to originate nearby, could produce a lethal dose of byproducts --particles called muons-- upon striking Earrth's atmosphere, a scientist said. "Most of the species on Earth --on the ground, underground and in the oceaans, seas and lakes down to tens of meters-- will be extinct directly by these penetrating muons." He and others have suggested that past mass extinctions on Earth might be caused by such events.
. . Other researchers argue that our atmosphere would instead protect life on Earth and that there is almost no danger. Either way, recent calculations by another science team showed that a properly aimed explosion near enough to threaten Earth occurs just once in a billion years.

Apr 10, 03: Our universe has always been expanding, with practically all galaxies receding from each other, except for those bound in clusters. The expansion was decelerating until about 6.3 billion years ago, however. Then an important switch to acceleration occurred.
. . Dark Energy: seen as a repulsive force, as vacuum energy, as anti-gravity, and as possibly no more than a different manifestation of gravity over large distances. Dark energy comprises 73% of the mass-energy budget of the universe, and that it is no longer an arguable point for theorists.
. . The so-called supernovae, announced this morning, are 5 billion and 8 billion light-years away and were found serendipitously by Hubble's new Advance Camera for Surveys, installed a year ago, while it was making a calibration run. The supernovae bracket the presumed time of the switch from deceleration to acceleration.

Apr 1, 03: Conventional thinking is that space and time can be thought of together as a sort of foam. As light travels through the foam, it ought to be disrupted, ever so slightly, such that by the time it crosses much of the universe, it would render only blurry pictures when gathered by a precision telescope. Put simple, Hubble ought to see a pixilation effect when photographing distant objects. It does not. Hubble pictures are crisp and clear, no matter the distance to the object.
. . And that, say two separate teams of researchers, might mean there are flaws in quantum theory.

Black Holes have a threshold called the Eddington Limit. If they start to accrete matter at a higher rate, the intense radiation would exert enough outward pressure to prevent more material from coming in.

Mar 27, 03: An eruptive star that brightened to 600,000 times its initial intensity and briefly outshone all others in the Milky Way Galaxy has astronomers amazed and puzzled over what happened. Oddly, it isn't hot and eruptive in the manner of a supernova or nova, both of which toss off outer layers in explosive fits. Instead, V838 Mon, as astronomers call it, achieved remarkable brilliance while swelling to gargantuan size and remaining cool at its surface.
. . If placed in the center of the solar system, it would engulf Jupiter. The visible structure around V838 Mon grows from 4 to 7 light-years during the sequence. Bond said if the dust is expanding at 223,700 mph (100 kilometers per second), then some of it was hurled into space about 20,000 years ago.
. . It has a smaller, hotter companion. Because the smaller star is of a common type, the researchers were able to use its brightness to estimate a distance to the pair, which they put at 20,000 light-years or more.

Mar 21, 03: The mass of the most distant black hole yet known has been determined. The huge black hole is at the center of what is known as a quasar, hidden in gas and dust. It weighs in at one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) times that of the Earth. Put another way, it is the mass of three billion Suns. This huge number is not unusual for a black hole but what is surprising is that such a massive structure formed so early in the history of the Universe.
. . It is 13 billion light-years away from Earth, so what we are seeing now gives a picture of the Universe when it was very youthful --when it was only 6% of its current age.

The average naked-eye limit is magnitude 6.5, on a scale in which negative numbers are reserved for the brightest stars, and increasingly higher positive numbers represent dimmer objects. Over the entire celestial sphere there are 8,479 stars to that magnitude limit. Half of these stars are always below the horizon. There is also the factor of atmospheric extinction, which severely reduces the number of stars visible near the horizon. So the total number any person can see at any given moment is close to 2,500.
. . In light-polluted areas, millions upon millions of precious watts are wasted because poorly designed street lamps send a portion of their light into the sky. In New York, for example, there are roughly 250 visible stars, or one-tenth the number that can be perceived under perfectly dark skies.

Mar 20, 03: Astronomers who flipped their telescopes to see a gamma ray burst "live" said they witnessed the death of a gigantic star and the birth of what looks like a black hole. They said NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer satellite, ground-based robotic telescopes and fast- thinking researchers around the globe managed to catch the fleeting flash of energy.
. . Their observations help support the theory that gamma-ray bursts come from stars as they collapse to become black holes.

Mar 18, 03: Photosynthesis on Earth requires eight photons of visible light to produce one molecule of oxygen, whereas twelve to sixteen photons of light in the infrared range would be needed to carry out the same task in a modified version of photosynthesis.
. . Unfortunately, oxygen has a weak infrared spectral signature, and would be very difficult for us to detect with present technology. But ozone (O3) has a very strong signal. Because ozone is produced by the interaction of UV light and oxygen, planets with an O3 signal will also have large amounts of O2 in the atmosphere.
. . But James Kasting, a professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University, says there are at least two circumstances where substantial amounts of O2 and O3 might be produced abiotically. "The first is a runaway greenhouse planet like Venus", says Kasting. "The second is a frozen, Mars-like planet, outside the habitable zone.
. . We will be able to search for carbon dioxide, water vapor, and ozone. The Terrestrial Planet Finder is scheduled for launch sometime between 2012 and 2015. The European Space Agency's Darwin telescope also shows promise for detecting the spectral signatures of life. Due to launch sometime around 2015, this telescope will survey thousands of star-planet systems looking for ozone, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and methane.

Mar 13, 03: Orbiting very close to a Sun-like star, a huge, searing hot planet has been discovered to be rapidly losing mass. It might eventually be stripped entirely of its gas envelope, leaving behind a liquid core of lava. At least 10,000 tons of material is lost every second.
. . The discovery was made by noting an extended and fleeing envelope of hydrogen, the first firm detection ever of that basic element in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. Like the tail of a comet, the hydrogen and possibly other substances trail the puffed-up atmosphere, which averages about three times the size of the planet's primary diameter.
. . The planet, named HD209458b, is just 7 million km from its star, or about 100 times closer than Jupiter is to our Sun, and even closer than Mercury is to our Sun. It circles the star every 3.5 days in an improbable configuration astronomers have come to call a "hot Jupiter" orbit.

Mar 7, 03: Many cosmologists used to believe in a Big Crunch. Then we learned of the acceleration & the cold, dark, never-ending end. The Caldwell group decided there might be a third possibility. That's the conventional view.
. . The Big Rip. A speculative but serious cosmology is described as a "pretty fantastic possibility" even by its lead author, Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth University. It explains one possible outcome for solid astronomical observations made in the late 1990s -- that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing pace, and that something unknown is vacuuming everything outward.
. . The Big Rip Theory has dark energy's prowess increasing with time, until it's an out-of-control phantom energy. Think of our car accelerating an additional 10 mph every half mile, then every hundred yards, then every foot. With nothing to cap the acceleration, all galaxies will eventually recede from one another at the speed of light, leaving each galaxy alone in a cold, dark universe within 100 billion years. We would not be able to see any other galaxies. The eventual pace would overwhelm the normal effects of gravity. Even the nuclear forces that bind things in the subatomic world will cease to be effective.
. . Caldwell's team has provided a precise countdown to total demise. The projected end is, reassuringly, 20 billion years away.
. . Dark matter is unseen stuff that is known to comprise 23% of the universe. Dark matter has unknown properties, and it may be related to dark energy. Dark energy, being quantified only recently, tends to be discussed as some strange new force, in addition to the four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces that govern atoms. But the repulsion is possibly just the way gravity behaves in the presence of dark energy, Caldwell said. In that sense, it is not a new force.
. . In another theory, put forth in 2001 by Steinhardt and colleagues, our universe is but a membrane, or brane, floating in a five-dimensional space. It is destined to collide dramatically with another brane. The idea, labeled the Ekpyrotic Universe, would replace portions of the Big Bang scenario while sticking to the presently accepted estimates of acceleration.

Feb 11, 03: A study found that the early universe was [& is] 4% real matter in the form of atoms, about 23% unseen dark matter, and about 73% dark energy, a totally unknown and esoteric force that causes the universe to accelerate at an ever-faster pace.
. . The new data show the universe to be 13.7 billion years old, +/- 200 million years. The results also confirm that the geometry of the universe is flat. This sort of geometry, the same as what's taught in high school, does not allow two parallel lines to intersect. [tho it may curve.]

Mar 5, 03: The Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, or OWL, would secure the title of world's largest optical telescope with a 100-meter aperture. It'll be in the Atacama Desert, about 5,000 meters above sea level.

Mar 5, 03: Nearly a year ago, two separate studies firmly linked GRBs (Gamma Ray Bursts) to exploding stars called supernovae. But one thing has continued to puzzle astronomers: The bursts seem to come in two distinct varieties, those lasting less than two seconds and those lasting longer. There's a growing consensus that the short bursts come from dramatic mergers of black holes or other massive objects, like neutron stars.
. . The longer bursts, according to the new study, appear to originate from the biggest supernovae, explosions of stars that are more than 30 times the mass of our Sun. Such explosions leave some material behind, which collapses back into what's known as a stellar black hole.

Feb 27, 03: Using a new French instrument called a NanoSIMS ion microprobe, scientists were able to pick out specks of star matter from black sprinkles of stardust that "shine like a beacon" when scanned, proving for the first time they do indeed come from beyond our solar system. The dust has been collected for years at 100,000 feet by high- altitude aircraft. "They are these little glass balls that are shot full of little beads of iron, nickel, metal and iron sulfides", Messenger added. "A colleague of ours has been looking at these things for years and found a lot of intriguing similarities with what astronomers think interstellar grains should look like." Some are crystalline, while others look more like glass.
. . "Something like 40,000 metric tons per year of this stuff is falling on Earth", Messenger said. It is believed to come from the tails of comets and from asteroids, which collected the dust as they spiraled into the sun.
. . They have identified just six pieces of genuine stardust. But the team has analyzed the bits and believe three came from red giants or asymptotic giant branch stars, a fourth from a metal-poor star and the fifth and sixth possibly came from a metal-rich star or a supernova.

Feb 21, 03: The so-called Boomerang Nebula, one of the youngest of its kind, has been observed in minute detail by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It seems that the central dying star has been expelling gas at such a rate that it has cooled as it expanded to such a degree that it is even colder than the cosmic background radiation that bathes all of space. A temperature of -272 C is only one degree warmer than absolute zero. Even the -270 C background radiation from the Big Bang that permeates the Cosmos is warmer than this nebula. It is the only object found so far that has a temperature lower than the background radiation.

Feb 21, 03: A new star was found because its relatively swift motion across the sky was picked up by automated sky surveys. In fact, it ranks as the third closest star system and the fifth closest star to our Sun. It is a faint red star, a so-called red dwarf, and is only 7.5 light years away. It is the closest star system to us after the Alpha Centauri system and Barnard's star. They say that more nearby stars are surely waiting to be discovered.

Feb 23, 03: Some mysterious source from beyond the galaxy periodically zaps Earth with high-energy cosmic rays from all directions. So far, the two leading experiments devoted to the detection and understanding of these rays have yielded contradictory results. That's because the rays are electrically charged and magnetic fields deflect their paths as they travel through the universe. But at the very highest energies, the rays will travel a direct line from their source to Earth, enabling scientists to pinpoint their origin.
. . Some scientists have proposed that the high-energy cosmic rays are produced by jets of matter emitted by supermassive black holes or by gamma-ray bursts, which are the most powerful explosions in the universe. Another possibility is topological defects, stresses and strains comparable to faults and folds in the Earth's crust that periodically release tremendous energies generated early in the history of the universe. Spinning neutron stars within the Milky Way galaxy are yet another explanation.
. . "A very young neutron star could be spinning so fast --3,000 times a second-- that its strong magnetic fields could hit these particles, almost like a baseball bat, to incredible energies", Olinto said.

Feb, 03: New data shows the universe was born 13.7 billion years ago. The lights came on only 200 million years later, much sooner than they had thought. And their data says the universe will die not with a bang, but a whimper. It will keep on expanding, forever, spreading matter ever thinner.
. . The astronomers say they also have a better idea of composition of the universe --sort of. They say it's about four percent atoms. About one-quarter is what astronomers call "dark matter". That leaves 73% of the universe in the form of an esoteric "dark energy".
. . Now we can actually calculate how many atoms are there in the universe!

Feb 11, 03: Scientists using a robotic NASA probe have determined with precision the age of the universe --13.7 billion years-- and figured out when stars began to shine. Astronomers have closed in on these numbers for decades, but a spacecraft now about 1.5 million Km from Earth was able to look back to nearly the dawn of time to find the answers, NASA researchers said.
. . Stars started shining just 200 million years after the theoretical Big Bang, scientists said in announcing findings of the so-called WMAP mission, which gazed on the universe when there were no stars, no galaxies, nothing except minute differences in temperature.
. . These temperature differences were as little as one-millionth of a degree, but that was enough to create vast hot and cold spots that signaled the beginning of the clumping that eventually became every known structure in the universe.

Some basic notions of reciprocity seem as familiar to chimpanzees as they do to humans. When Chimp A grooms Chimp B, the giving primate might expect payback at dinner time. And often, the altruistic chimp gets what’s expected.
. . It may seem natural to send extraterrestrials something like a comprehensive encyclopedia, albeit one written in some sort of universal language. For example, the logic-based language suggested by Dutch mathematician Hans Freudenthal, Lincos (short for Lingua Cosmica), starts with counting and basic arithmetic, progresses through notions of time and space, and ultimately explains something about how humans act and interact with one another.
. . In 1972, at a SETI conference, artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky made his case for the superiority of computer programs as interstellar messages. If we can trust what people say, it certainly seems as if at least sometimes people really do go out of their way to benefit others, with no tangible rewards for themselves. Nevertheless, some sociobiologists would claim that this is only self-deception, and that payoffs may be indirect, for example, in the form of an enhanced reputation for doing good.

Jan 13, 2003: Astronomers from the University of Mexico have found a distant star system where a small, young star has been flung out of its star group by the gravitational interaction with its neighbors. The star, called T Tauri Component Sb, has 20% the mass of the Sun, and was part of a group of stars 450 light years from the Earth. The team has been tracking the path of the rogue star since 1983, and watched it slingshot past one star and head out into space.

Jan 9, 03: Astronomers looking more than 13 billion light years across the universe have captured images from just 800 million years after the big bang, when all stars and galaxies were fresh and young. Using a highly sensitive camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, researchers from the Arizona State University and the University of Arizona gathered very faint ultraviolet images, little more than red blurs, of stellar objects that were formed and shining when the universe was about seven times smaller than it is now.

Jan 9, 03: A small, young star has been ejected from a star group in the constellation Taurus and is now wandering away on its own, astronomers say. Researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico showed that the star was gravitationally ejected from its family after a close encounter with two bigger stars. Tauri Sb, was part of a group of four young stars some 450 light years from Earth. The group includes a massive star, called T Tauri north, and a binary, or double star, called T Tauri Sa. Tauri Sb was the smallest in the family with a mass of about 20% of the sun.
. . In 1995, Tauri Sb passed within about 200 million miles of the binary, which has a total mass of about twice the sun. The gravitational effect of the close pass acted on Tauri Sb like a slingshot, sending the small star streaking out in another direction at twice its earlier speed. The small star may have captured enough velocity from the celestial slingshot to escape the group altogether. "By watching over the next five years or so, we should be able to tell."
. . The ejection from star families of young protostars may be the source of brown dwarfs, gas balls that never collected enough mass to turn on core nuclear fires and become stars. Such objects, because of their low mass, would be preferentially ejected from multi-star groups, said Loinard. The observations showing the ejection of Tauri Sb spanned less than two decades.

Jan 8, 03: One of the brightest and biggest stars in the heavens is going through a series of eruptions and dimming that may lead eventually to a supernova explosion, astronomers say. The star, called Rho Cassiopeia, is a hypergiant with 20 to 40 times the mass of the sun. It puts out a half million times more light than the sun and can easily be seen from Earth even though it is 10,000 light years away. But Rho Cas is a seething, unstable ball of gas that expands and contracts over time and occasionally erupts with a violence that sends immense amounts of matter streaming through space.
. . "We were exceptionally lucky to witness a stunning explosion." The astronomers estimated that Rho Cas blasted mass equal to 10,000 Earths into space. All of this activity suggests that Rho Cas is nearing the end. "These stars live only a few million years, and it is in the late stages of its evolution." Eventually, perhaps in a few thousand years, Dupree said Rho Cas will erupt into a supernova explosion.

Jan 8, 03: The first accurate measurement ever taken of the speed with which gravity propagates shows that it is equal to the speed of light, agreeing nicely with the General Theory of Relativity. The very high-precision measurement was the first to check whether Einstein's assumption about gravity was correct.

Jan 7, 03: A team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena presented images today of a rare Hyper Extremely Red Object (Hero). This dim object, located near a galaxy 10 billion light years away is traveling away from us at almost the speed of light. In fact, it's so far, and moving so fast, it has gone way past being red-shifted --it's only visible in infrared light.

Jan 7, 03: Using a cosmic "zoom lens" made up of cluster of a trillion stars, the Hubble Space Telescope looked back in time to see the universe just 2 billion years after the theoretical Big Bang, astronomers said.
. . Hubble's new Advanced Camera for Surveys looked straight through a massive galaxy cluster known as Abell 1689. The gravity of the cluster's trillion stars acts as a monster magnifying glass in space, warping and magnifying the light of galaxies far behind it. Abell 1689 is 2.2 billion light-years away, and it acts as a 2 million-light-year-wide "zoom lens" in space.

Jan 6, 03: Astronomers said they have detected the most distant planet ever by watching its star dim as the planet passed between it and Earth, a new method that could open up the search for small worlds like ours. Of the more than 100 planets found thus far around stars other than the sun, this is the most distant --at 8,000 light-years from Earth, it is more than 30 times as far away as any of the others. It is the first extrasolar planet detected outside what astronomers call the local neighborhood, the Orion spiral arm.
. . Transit searching, which measures the brightness of stars and then watches the brightness fade as a cosmic body passes in front of them. This is the first time a so- called extrasolar planet --one not in the solar system-- has been identified using this technique. It's a discovery technique allows you to survey millions of stars", he said. The current field of stellar candidates that might have planets around them is around 40,000. "What is going to happen in the next year, no more than one year, is going to be a whole new wave of transit search technique planets, and compared to the first one this is going to be a tsunami."
. . Slightly lighter than Jupiter, but about 2.6 times the diameter, the new planet --called OGLE-TR-56b-- has a density similar to Saturn. It whips around its star every 29 hours, because it's about 14 times closer than Mercury is to our sun. It might have formed farther from the star before migrating to its current close orbit.
. . The climate is inhospitable in the extreme, featuring
IRON RAIN!!
. . Its atmosphere is about 2,000 Kelvin (3,100 degrees Fahrenheit). Such a temperature is just right to form clouds of iron atoms. When it rains, what comes down would likely be microscopic droplets of iron. [to bright liquid-iron oceans? Yes. "Water"falls? --no, probably a near-perfect sphere.]

Jan 7, 03: A new survey scanning the outskirts of the Milky Way has found a belt of stars that are different in chemistry and in motion from stars within the galaxy, suggesting they are the remnants of a galactic collision that may have occurred 10 billion years ago.
. . The faint surrounding ring has 100 million to a half billion stars circling the Milky Way in an orbital period of tens of thousands of years.
. . A structure called the Sagittarius tidal stream, which circles the Milky Way at an angle, is thought to be the remains of a small galaxy. And astronomers have found evidence that the Milky Way is beginning the process of cannibalizing the Magellanic Cloud, a nearby galaxy expected to fall into the Milky Way in a few billion years.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that a dying star about 1.5 times the mass of our sun would not be able to support itself against its own gravity. If a collapsing star is beyond this mass limit, then it will continue contracting and form a "black hole".
. . If a star is under the "Chandrasekhar mass limit" it could eventually stop its contraction and become a "white dwarf", with a radius of a few thousand miles. This white dwarf would have a density mass/ volume of hundreds of tons per cubic inch. These white dwarves are supported by the Pauli exclusion principle of quantum mechanics: repulsion between the electrons of their atoms.
. . A another fate for stars supported by the exclusion principle is called a "neutron star", and these have collapsed past electron-repulsion & are supported by repulsion between protons and neutrons. These neutron stars are much smaller & denser than even white dwarves.

There's a theory that our Sun resides with other stars in a sort of cavity in space carved out by some supernova that would have occurred long ago.

Dec 16, 02: Since the early 1970s, astronomers have speculated about the danger posed to our planet by exploding stars called supernovae. Among the negative aspects to such an event would be the sudden depletion of Earth's protective ozone layer, the thinking goes. Left naked to space, we might then be fried by the UV rays of our own Sun.
. . Researchers have suggested that one or more mass extinctions during the past few hundred million years might have been triggered by supernovae, and that it might happen again. But a new and detailed set of calculations shows that such events are probably extremely rare. The study found that for a supernova to significantly deplete ozone it would have to occur within 26 light-years of our planet. Other data show that this happens only about once in a billion years. "This particular pathway for mass extinctions may be less important than previously thought", Gehrels and his colleagues write in a paper in the March 10, 03 issue Astrophysical Journal. The standard supernova is not the only risk factor posed by stellar explosions, however.

Dec 9, 02: 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the first hydrogen molecules (H2) are thought to have developed from hydrogen atoms. At about 500 million years, researchers found, the temperature became cold enough for hydrogen atoms to freeze into ice grains or snow.
. . They looked at the thermodynamics of space after the Big Bang and before the first stars were born, along with the stuff that existed back then. They conclude, in a soon-to-be-published report, that hydrogen snow would have developed. Scientists can't even figure out exactly when or how it ended, but it seems to have run for at least half a billion years.

There may be as many brown dwarfs as there are stars. But only a few have been discovered since the first was found in 1995.

Dec 5, 02: A planet discovered far beyond our Solar System has been for the first time accurately weighed, confirming the validity of the primary method -- the "wobble" method -- used to detect extrasolar worlds. The star, called Gliese 876, is 15 light-years away. Its planet is named Gliese 876b.
. . Gliese 876b is now known to weigh between 1.89 and 2.4 times as much as Jupiter. Previous estimates had put the planet's mass between 1.9 and 100 times that of Jupiter. A second planet is thought to orbit the star, but its presence was not sought in the new study.
. . The transit method provides similar information to Benedict's astrometry technique, plus it can be used to probe a planet's atmosphere. But the transit method works only if the planet is aligned in such a way that it crosses in front of the star as seen from our point of view. Fewer than 10% of planets are set up this way. Astrometry will work with any planetary system, in principle.

Dec 4, 02: Proxima Centauri is so small that astronomers have not been able to accurately measure it. Proxima Centauri is a very-low-mass star, in fact barely massive enough to burn hydrogen to helium in its interior. It is about seven times smaller than the Sun, and the surface temperature is "only" about 3000 degrees, about half of that of our own star. Consequently, it is also much fainter --the intrinsic brightness is only 1/150th oof that of Sol.
. . New calculations: The star has a mass and diameter about 1/7 of those of the Sun. It is 150 times more massive than Jupiter, but only about 1.5 times larger in diameter.

Nov 28, 02: Most scientists have maintained that planets the size of Jupiter, the largest in our solar system, take several million years to coalesce out of the massive disks of cosmic debris that surround infant stars. But research published in the journal Science indicates that these monstrous disks tend to break up after just a few years.

Nov 25, 02: The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy turns out to be the closest neighbor to our own, just 75,000 light-years from Earth. Researchers began to suspect the galaxy was being absorbed by the Milky Way, an idea that got further support in a new study. Other evidence of mergers has shown up in the past couple of years in the form of stellar entrails, small streams of stars that travel in packs throughout the Milky Way but on paths unrelated to the movement of the rest of the galaxy's stars.

Nov 18, 02: A runaway black hole is streaking through the Milky Way galaxy, dragging an aging star along to snack on as it heads in Earth's general direction. There is absolutely no need to panic, though: The black hole will get no closer to our solar system than 1,000 light-years, and that will not happen for 200 million years or so. Right now it is between 6,000 and 9,000 light-years away.
. . This is only the second black hole found to be moving at high speed. It must have been formed in a supernova explosion. 370,000 km/h, four times faster than stars in its galactic neighborhood. The black hole's companion star, which revolves around it every 2.6 days, managed to survive the explosion only to spend its declining days being nibbled to death.

The Milky Way is approaching the nearby Andromeda galaxy at a rate of 100 miles per second. That velocity will probably increase as we get closer, & the expectation is that we're going to have a collision billions of years from now.

Astronomer Sebastian von Hoerner argued that extraterrestrials could even have music similar to Earth’s —so similar that we shouldn’t be surprised to find them using the same musical scales that we do! . Since the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, we have known that there is an innate connection between music and math. Musical notes can be described in terms of precise frequencies, and harmonic combinations of these notes occur when their respective frequencies are in a precise ratio to one another. To the mathematician, the result is a simple fraction. To the listener, it is a harmonic sound.

About one-third of all the stars you can see are actually double stars. And about half of what astronomers thought to be double star systems observed in a recent study were actually triples.

Oct 24, 02: A new planet circling another star has been found using a new technique that will allow astronomers to find planets no other current method can. The new method uses the patterns created in the dust surrounding a star to discern the presence of a planet that could be as small as Earth. The new planet, tentatively named Epsilon Eridani C, is roughly a tenth of Jupiter's mass and completes an orbit once every 280 years. This method does not work for all stars.

Oct 17, 02: Researchers have been doubtful that planets could exist at all in systems where two stars circle each other in a tight orbit, and have consequently concentrated their searches on single stars. But the new discovery shows planets can exist within binary systems and that planetary systems may be more common. "It increases the scope for finding other planets. It would seem quite likely that there are a few Pluto-sized objects, maybe even Mars-sized objects" that lie farther out than Quaoar in the Kuiper belt.
. . The newly found body has 1.76 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the larger of two stars that form a binary system called Gamma Cephei, 45 light years from Earth. The smaller star orbits the larger one at about the distance from the Sun to Uranus.

Oct 16, 02: Scientists said they have discovered at the center of our galaxy a huge black hole. They zeroed in on the black hole by analyzing 10 years of data to observe nearly the entire orbit of a star called "S2", in close orbit (about 15 years) around the black hole. It's seven times larger than the Sun and must travel at phenomenal speed to avoid being sucked in by the black hole.

Sept 18, 02: Astronomers scanning southern skies in search of distant planetary systems have discovered a Jupiter-like planet 100 light years away circling a star similar to our own sun. The planet is the 100th to be found outside the solar system. It's three times as far away from its star as the earth is from the Sun. He said astronomers now see a pattern for systems to be of two types: those with high-mass planets close to their star and others with high-mass planets orbiting much further out.
. . "This Tau1 Gruis planet is in the second group, which is in the majority. Why are there these two groups? We hope the theorists will be able to explain this."

Sept 19, 02: Astronomers using a radio telescope at the South Pole reported they had recorded a flicker of light from nearly 14 billion years ago that verifies most modern theory about the cosmos. It involved a measurement of a minute polarization of cosmic microwave background. The announcement described that background as the "sky-pervading afterglow of the big bang" to which experts trace the origin of the universe.

Sept 18, 02: Italian astronomers have found signs of water, a necessary ingredient for life, in the atmosphere of planets orbiting distant stars. Having water does not mean other planets teem with life, but if the discovery is confirmed, it will fuel speculation that it's possible. The team found the emissions in three planetary systems.

~Sept 1, 02: A new class of cosmic object. Astronomers have found new evidence for the existence and variety of magnetars, powerful stellar corpses noted for their extreme magnetic fields. Earth has a magnetic field that is about 1 gauss strong, in scientific terms. The Sun's can be about 10 to 50 gauss --roughly a magnetic force equivalent to a refrigerator magnet but on a much larger scale. Magnetars are thought to have billions of times more magnetic energy.

Aug 13, 02: A photograph of a patch of sky (roughly equal to the full moon) in the Southern Hemisphere peers through a galaxy to reveal more than 100,000 distant galaxies. While the near galaxy is just 7 million light-years away, the mean distance of the background galaxies is 8 billion light-years. "It becomes clear that galaxies are distributed in a highly non-uniform way."

If a star loses mass before it gets too big (red giant), then its planets move into a larger orbit and may escape --perhaps explaining the "lost", non-stellar objects recently found.

The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia:
. . http://www.obspm.fr/encycl/encycl.html
. . The tally of confirmed extrasolar planets hovers ambiguously above 100. By some counts, the list is larger --if one includes planet-like objects that float freely in space and don't orbit stars. By other counts, it is smaller --if one excludes possible planets that have not been through peer review and published in a scientific journal. It appears that we will continue to find anywhere from one dozen to a few dozen planets per year for several more years.

June 13, 02: A team of astronomers announced today the discovery of the first planet outside our solar system with an orbit similar to Jupiter's, a configuration that has the potential to support an Earth-like planet. The primary discovery is a gas giant planet that circles a star called 55 Cancri every 13 years, comparable to Jupiter's 11.86- year orbit. The planet is between 3.5 and 5 times as heavy as Jupiter. Theory holds that it would be gaseous, not rocky.
. . They also found the least massive world ever detected around another star, a planet just 40 times as heavy as Earth... 15% the mass of Jupiter. Marcy has said the wobble method will not be able to find planets weighing less than 10 Earth-masses. This so-called transit method could spot a planet twice as big as Earth. This brings the total of positively-known extrasolar planets to 98.

New Estimate of Exoplanets in Our Galaxy: 30 Billion

April 10, 02: There's now evidence for a completely new form of matter, in what they call a quark star. It's made of free-floating sub-sub-atomic particles called quarks, and strange quarks at that.
. . A teaspoon of neutron star material weighs a billion tons, or as much as all cars, trucks and buses on Earth. Neutrons in a neutron star are made of quarks, but bundled together in relatively roomy groups of so-called confined quarks.

Feb 21, 02: Astronomer Frank Drake, the Father of SETI, has argued that ET will likely be altruistic, rather than malevolent. Drake reasons that if extraterrestrials are hostile, then their civilizations won’t last very long, and we’re unlikely to make contact with them. Only extraterrestrials with a long-lasting, stable society will be around long enough to be detected by our SETI programs.
. . But in the face of missing information, people have a tendency to fill in the blanks. Even if people may not be sure what ET is like from scientific evidence, they will tend to form opinions, in part based on their habitual ways of seeing life. If people feel the world is cold and cruel, they’re more likely than other people to imagine extraterrestrials as cold and cruel.

Perspective: the nearest star is several LY away, but millions of stars orbit within just one light-year of the Galactic center. Many collide & form Black Holes.

Sure, telescopes are looking for exo-planets, but dust? Dust around a star that harbors no large planets will be evenly distributed. But a planet the size of Neptune or bigger will create an arc-like structure where the dust piles up. The features should be identifiable with infrared telescopes already in operation.
. . They have a candidate star in mind, called Epsilon Eridani, just 10 light-years away, whose dust disk was imaged by other researchers in 1998.

How many Jupiters? Like 30 billion, 50% more than formerly expected. There are, maybe, the same number of Earths as Jupiters.

Feb 1, 02: Dark matter, a mysterious form of matter unlike familiar atoms and subatomic particles, came into being almost immediately after the Big Bang, long before ordinary matter formed. They discovered a cluster of stars more than 13 billion light-years from Earth that formed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. est: 13-14 B old.
. . The total number of galaxies at that time appears to be much higher than today --between 3 and 10 times higher.

Late Jan 02: Researchers used the Hubble telescope to spot gold in an ancient star called BD +173248. They figure the star captured the gold from the explosion of an even older star. The finding confirms theories about how heavier elements were conceived gradually from the light elements that produced the first stars. The discovery, announced last week at an AAS meeting, was made by researchers at several institutions. For what it's worth, here's what it's worth: $7 billion trillion. Oh, and that's not counting the silver and platinum that was also detected.

Jan 14, 02: Researchers announced a dozen newly found stars all within 33 light-years of Earth --next-door neighbors by cosmic measures. All the stars were found in the southern sky. The nearest of the newly discovered objects is 20 light-years away, putting it at 55th on the list of closest stars.
. . Seven are alone in space; two orbit each other in what's called a binary star system; and the remaining three are in a rarer three-star system, all orbiting each other. The nearest one is only about a third of the size of the Sun and emits less than 1% as much light. One of the stars is a white dwarf. The others are red dwarfs. Because of their proximity, the newly identified stars could prove useful as targets for planet hunters.

Jan 14, 02: The Hubble Constant wasn't always the same. Supernova evidence suggests that the acceleration kicked in about 5 billion years ago. At that time, galaxies were far enough apart that their gravity (which weakens with distance) was overwhelmed by the relatively gentle but constant repulsive force of dark energy. Since then, dark energy's continuing push has been causing the cosmic expansion to speed up, and it seems likely now that this expansion will continue indefinitely.
. . "It means that if you look out at the universe today, and if we wait many billions of years", says Hogan, "everything will be flying away faster and faster, and eventually we'll be left quite alone."

Jan 11, 02: It turns out the universe is NOT pale green --it's beige. A flaw in the software changed it to green. Here's the original story:
. ...Not plain green, though. It's pale turquoise. Call this universal shade: cosmic spectrum green.
. . By giving a numeric value to the colors of the different galaxies, adding them together and then averaging them, they came up with their light green color. As there are no new young stars formed, the universe will get redder", Baldry told reporters who gathered around his poster in a huge exhibition hall. "It started out blue as the light is dominated by hot stars. So far, it's evolved to a greenish color. But there is no way any human could actually see this. "The only way to see it is if you saw all the universe from the same distance away and it was not moving", Baldry said. [ The Doppler Effect changes the color of light.]

Jan 10, 02: An astronomer who was looking for signs of planet formation around young, double-star systems instead found a third star in about half the cases. It involved a complex system called "speckle holography" to generate high precision.
. . The surprising discoveries spell trouble for planet development. The particles that need to coalesce to form seeds of planets would have a hard time sticking together in such a gravitationally complex place.
. . Stellar trios are not unknown. But they are not exactly common, either. At least astronomers don't yet know if they are common.
. . It was not noticed before because it orbits very close to one of the other stars. This compact duo then orbits together, at a greater distance, around a third star. Some of the stars are so close to each other that their dust disks likely crash into each other, driving some of the dust into the stars or ejecting it into interstellar space.

The Laser Interferometer Gravity-wave Observatory, or LIGO for short.

Some hope gravity wave detectors will be the key that unlocks one of the biggest enigmas of the cosmos --dazzling bursts of gamma rays that pour out more energy in a few minutes than most galaxies do in a year. Black hole collisions could churn out gravity waves strong enough to be detectable.
. . LIGO has refined interferometry to an unparalleled degree. There's a 30-foot no-walk zone around the mirror chambers. The reason? The gravity generated by a human body is enough to register on the detector. LIGO can detect mirror motion of a billionth of a billionth of a millimeter, or one-thousandth of a proton's width.
. . The idea is to split a light beam at a right angle --in LIGO's case, down the concrete tubes forming the "L". They are pumped so free of air that internal pressure is just one-trillionth of an atmosphere, making them one of the biggest vacuum systems in the world. The beams are bounced off mirrors and recombined to form an interference pattern. When a gravity wave rolls past, it compresses one mirror and stretches the other, changing the pattern.

Jan 7, 01: Astronomers have found evidence for the first known planet orbiting a giant star that is aged and swollen the way our Sun will one day be. It's a star called iota Draconis, which is 13 times larger than the Sun. Until now, it was not known if planets existed around giant stars. Added to recent findings of extrasolar planetary systems that are markedly unlike the one around the Sun, the new finding makes our solar system look like an oddball in the galaxy.
. . The planet orbits iota Draconis once every 1.5 years and so is thought to be at a distance similar to Earth's distance from the Sun. But the planet is nothing like Earth. It is probably made mostly of gas and is at least 8.7 times the mass of Jupiter, the researchers say, though it could be much larger.
. . Iota Draconis is 100 light-years from Earth. It is visible with the naked eye in the morning sky, just east of the Big Dipper.

Dec 12, 01: A young Sun-like star called AB Doradus rotates 50 times faster than the Sun. It spins on its axis roughly once every 12.4 hours. It's 50 light-years from Earth in the southern hemisphere. It is about the same size as the Sun, though slightly less massive and cooler. While Sol is middle-aged at about 4.6 billion years old, AB Doradus is estimated to be just 30 million years old.
The diameter of Altair, the twelfth brightest star in the summer night sky across North America, is so fast- spinning, it's 14% greater diameter at the equator than at the poles.
. . Other studies had shown that Altair rotates about its axis very rapidly --once every 10.4 hours, giving a speed of rotation of at least 210 kps (470,000 mph).

Nov 27, 01: The Hubble Space Telescope has spied the atmosphere of a planet orbiting a star 150 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus, NASA said. The planet, about the size of Jupiter and orbiting close to the star HD209458, has an atmosphere loaded with sodium and is inhospitable to earthly life.
. . It's the first time of an atmosphere around a planet outside our solar system. They did it by watching the planet make a three-hour transit in front of its star, and trained Hubble's spectrograph on both. "Those (future) observations will hopefully find us planets where there is evidence of carbon dioxide, water vapor, ozone and methane", Boss said. "If you can find all four of those signatures in the same planet, you can make a very strong case that that planet is habitable, if not actually inhabited."
. . Hubble's success in seeing this planet's atmosphere could point the way to searching for new Earth-like planets using the transit technique.
. . To optimize their precious telescope time, the researchers confined their search to sodium, an easy-to- detect element they expected would exist.
. . It is relatively small as known exoplanets go, about 70% the size of Jupiter. Its year -- the time it takes to orbit the star -- is just 3.5 days. Temperatures likely soar to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 degrees Celsius).
. . A true-color painting of the planet may soon be possible. Charbonneau and Brown are now using Hubble to examine faint starlight reflected off the planet just as it passes behind the edge of its star. The results, based on a barely measurable amount of starlight, could reveal the color and reflectivity of the planet and indicate whether clouds of dust or metallic elements might be present.
. . By developing the technique further, Charbonneau and Brown think it could one day be used to detect chemicals that are only produced as a result of biological activity --when life is present. They have a proposal in to use Hubble next year to search the same planet for water vapor, carbon monoxide and methane. The latter could be used to pin down the planet's temperature.

A well respected study released in September found that 87 percent of the universe is dark matter. Some scientists have even speculated that entire galaxies may be made of nothing that can be seen.
. . There are two types of dark matter, however.
. . Some, like the newly imaged red dwarf star, represents regular old matter wrapped up in hard-to-spot packages --cold, dim stars that aren't readily observable with present technology. Collectively, these objects have come to be called MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects).
. . Truly dark matter, on the other hand, is thought to be made of invisible particles that have yet to be detected. These particles are called WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).
. . Most of the mass in the universe is likely attributable to WIMPs, researchers suspect. Yet only when more MACHOs are found and weighed will their contribution be known for sure.

Nov 15, 01: The first light flickering in the universe following its creation in the Big Bang most likely came from a star about 100 times more massive than the sun that formed in the collapse of a primordial cloud of hydrogen and helium.
. . Three astrophysicists used a sophisticated supercomputer simulation to study how the first stars were formed following the Big Bang, the humongous explosion of matter and energy 12 billion years ago thought to have spawned the universe.
. . These original stars were huge, with a size range of about 30 to 300 times the mass of the sun, with 100 solar masses the most likely size, Abel said. But none of them still exist, having blown apart eons ago in supernovae -- star explosions. Scientists believe it haas taken many generations of stars --each processing the debris left behind by earlier ones and then belching it out through supernovae-- to produce the abundance of elements now found.

For the first time, scientists have seen energy being extracted from a black hole. Like an electric dynamo, this black hole spins and pumps energy out through cable-like magnetic field lines into the chaotic gas whipping around it, making the gas --already infernally hot from the sheer force of crushing gravity-- even hotter.
. . "The gravity in this region appears to be so intense that the very fabric of space twists around the black hole, dragging magnetic field lines along with it", said Wilms. "The magnetic fields tighten about the black hole, slowing its spin. This 'friction' heats the region to even higher temperatures." The team observed the X-ray glow of iron gas traveling about half the speed of light very close to the black hole.

29 October 2001: Neutron stars form when old stars explode and collapse. Electrons are squeezed into protons, forming neutrons, and the object stuffs a mass greater than our Sun into an area as small as Manhattan. Then it rotates about its axis several times per second. An object so different from Earth might not be expected to have anything in common. But Jeremy Heyl from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics thinks neutron stars create Earth-like weather. A high-speed river of air called the jet stream is created by Earth's rotation. The jet stream, along which storms track, runs into high-altitude planetary waves, called Rossby waves, modulating weather on the surface. According to a story in New Scientist magazine, Heyl said Rossby waves on a neutron star cause gas to burn brighter in some spots than others. "As the star rotates you see light and dark spots", he said. The idea could explain a flicker of X-rays observed on neutron stars in 1996 by NASA's Tod Strohmayer, who called Heyl's idea "a nice piece of work."

July, 01: Astro-psychologist Albert Harrison, at the University of California Davis, in his new book, Spacefaring - The Human Dimension, cites several proposals by deep space thinkers that question the need for human migration to the stars. That includes hurling starbound super-powerful computers that are surrogate brains, packed with personality, a sense of self, memory, and other psychological qualities.
. . "The beauty of this, if it worked, is that there would be no need for life support as we normally think of it", Harrison said. Star-leaping clones of the human mind would make the voyage, long after the physical bodies they represented had perished, he said.
. . Yet another popular idea, Harrison recounts, is merely sending a probe filled with genetic codes from Earth, along with a way to cultivate that life upon arrival. Eventually, intelligent life forms would begin to develop. This approach allows seeding life throughout the galaxy without the messy drudgery of protracted human voyaging, he notes.
. . Starbase modules, filled with archived but active personalities of crew and colonists, could also make the first interstellar excursions. On their arrival, the crews need not waste time setting up terraforming operations. Rather, the colonists would adapt and thrive in whatever environment they are dealt. Follow-on waves of colonists can be dispatched as "radioed datafiles" across interstellar space, Bainbridge said.
. . In future centuries, Starbase archives sent throughout the galaxy can be resurrected into robots, clones or cyborgs, Bainbridge said.

July 5, 01: "Amazingly, calculations show that the gravitational horseplay between stellar embryos almost always end up with the lightest member being violently flung out of the little group", Reipurth said.
. . Brown dwarfs are rarely found as close companions to normal stars. Close examination with large telescopes of free-floating brown dwarfs has shown that some are binaries. All known binary brown dwarfs are relatively close to each other.
. . The last few years have seen a flurry of discoveries of giant planets orbiting other stars, and it has been hotly debated whether such giant planets are simply very small brown dwarfs. "This is not the case", said Reipurth.
. . Stars require roughly 8% of our Sun's mass to begin the process of nuclear ignition. Less, & they become brown dwarfs.
. . "Even though brown dwarfs failed in the end to become stars, they still were formed the same way as stars. In contrast, giant planets are frequently found as very close companions to stars, implying they grew as planets from circumstellar disks like planets in our Solar system."

Our galaxy is predicted to collide with Andromeda three billion years from now. Astronomers have known for almost a century that the two galaxies are falling together at a little more 500,000 kilometers an hour.

Roughly half of all the points of light in the night sky are actually binary star systems.

June 7, 01: Researchers announced hopes for a planet, albeit a frigid and dark world, orbiting a brown dwarf near our Solar System. The evidence came in the form of dust disks found around a host of brown dwarfs.
. . If brown dwarfs, even those on the low end of the range of mass for these objects, have planets around them, now there is no question that brown dwarfs form as stars do.
. . The debris disks strongly indicate that these free-floating brown dwarfs formed in the same way other stars form, in the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust.
. . "These would be very, very cold planets", said Charles J. Lada, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. "They're probably not really great places to have life." --15-20 Kelvin!
. . 100 objects that had previously been suspected of being brown dwarfs. More than half (63%) emitted extra infrared light, indicating a ring of hot, glowing debris. "The number of brown dwarfs that have disks is similar to the number of stars that have disks in Orion." Hubble observations had already spotted four of these disks in visible light but had not recognized them as circumstellar disks.
. . Recently, researchers have spotted very faint objects floating freely in space that are smaller than most brown dwarfs, roughly 10 times as massive as Jupiter, and some have called them planets. Detecting planets around a brown dwarf, even one that's a light year away, would be "an enormous challenge."

June 5, 01: Astronomers have peered deeper than ever into the past and spied the most distant objects ever seen --two quasars formed when the universe was just 800 million years old. The announcement marks the fourth time the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has pushed closer to the birth of the universe some 13 billion years ago.

Calculations show that supermassive black holes each downed the equivalent of 10 Suns, on average, every year when the universe was young. Nowadays, the average rate of consumption is down to just one-hundredth of a Sun per black hole per year.
. . Researchers are now nearly certain that quasars simply primitive galaxies, very far away and powered by highly active, supermassive black holes.

June 7, 01: Middleweight black holes, thought to be an oddity when they were discovered two years ago, are turning out to be common and may be the building blocks of nature's most massive black holes when several join forces to become one.
. . These middleweight black holes, if they are in fact what they seem, may well be common. The Chandra X-ray Telescope alone is "nearly every day" finding more of them.

To get a density figure, the team looked at "peculiar" velocities created when the superclusters of galaxies tug and pull on nearby galaxies whizzing by. That led them to calculate that the universe is one third as populated as the calculated density that would halt an expanding universe.

March 13th, 01: Astronomers looking back in time reported that the early universe was probably dominated by three things: "black holes, black holes and black holes."
. . There may have been as many as 300 billion black holes in the entire sky when the universe was young, scientists said at a briefing at NASA headquarters.

The general rule for planetary stability in two-star systems is that the axis ratios should be greater than 3-to- 1. This means that if two stars that orbit each other are fairly far apart, a planet could orbit one or the other at a distance of less than one-third their separation. (This is the configuration of the giant planet that orbits 16 Cygni B, the lesser bright of the 16 Cygni double star system.) On the other hand, if the two stars are very close (usually the case for eclipsing binaries) then a planet can stably orbit both, provided its orbit is at least 3 times the two stars' mutual separation.

October 15, 01: An international team of astronomers has discovered eight new extrasolar planets, at least two of which have circular orbits reminiscent of the planets in our solar system. The latest discoveries bring the total of known planets outside our solar system to around 80.
. . The eight newly detected planets orbit their stars at distances ranging from about 0.07 AU to 3 AU. (One AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance from Earth to the Sun.) They range in mass from 0.8 to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system.
. . The study, one of many similar ones in recent months, again illustrates that the pace of exoplanet discovery is increasing. The first planet outside our solar system was detected in 1995.

August 15, 2001: The speed of light and other constants that scientists have relied on to explain the universe and its formation may not be so constant, according to a new study conducted by an international team of researchers.
. . The finding involves what physicists and cosmologists have considered to be a basic law of nature involving the strength of attraction between electrically charged particles.
. . Studying how light was absorbed by metallic atoms in gas clouds some 12 billion light-years away, researchers found that the fine structure constant, as it is called, may be changing subtly as the universe grows older.

Most massive stars form in pairs, and astronomers have long puzzled what happens when a supernova occurs in a close binary system. They've found such a pair. The two stars orbit each other once every 4.1 days in a surprisingly eccentric orbit.
. . Their orbital period must have been close to two days prior to the explosion, so that when the supernova occurred, the stars were so close that they were almost touching. The extremely distorted orbit found by McSwain indicates that the dead star in LS 5039 must have lost more than 15 times the mass of the Sun in the cataclysm that wracked them.
. . [Jon: I now wonder if Sol went thru such an experience. We know it's a third generation star, so there's nothing extraordinary about this.]

May 10, 01: Many elementary particles splinter into shards, but not the electron. At least scientists *hadn't thought so. According to *new theoretical research, however, there are extreme conditions under which even electrons divide. Loose electrons in ultracold liquid helium might split into fragments when exposed to light. This begins to slove a mystery noticed years ago.

May 16, 2001: A new, more precise measurement of the amount of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, in the universe backs up previous work and the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe. Consistent with other independent measurements, it gave the team confidence that they and other scientists are closing in on one of the most important pieces of evidence for proving the Big Bang theory.
. . The following picture emerges. The universe is composed of 4% protons, electrons and other familiar particles, about 30% is in some mysterious, invisible form of matter called dark matter and about 66 percent is in a still more mysterious form of matter-energy called dark energy.

4-7-01: An international team of astronomers from the Geneva Observatory and other research institutes announced the discovery of 11 new planetary companions to solar-type stars.
. . The discoveries include a giant planet that circles its Sun-like central star in an orbit similar to Earth's and whose potential satellites could theoretically be "habitable."
. . The discovery also includes two new multi-planet systems. The masses of these new objects range from slightly less than, to about 10 times the mass of the planet Jupiter.
. . One is a two-planet system revolving around the star HD 82943 that indicates one orbital period is nearly exactly twice as long as the other -- cases like this (referred to as "orbital resonance") are well known in our own solar system.
. . They also discovered a planet (at star HD 80606) with the most elongated orbit detected so far, moving between a near point of 3.1 million and far point of 78.9 million miles (5 million and 127 million kilometers) from the central star.
. . There are 63 known extrasolar-planet candidates with minimum masses below 10 Jupiter masses, and 67 known objects with minimum masses below 17 Jupiters. Total extra-solar: 130.

Sometime between 4 billion and 8 billion years ago, the universe started to speed up in its expansion and both Riess and Peter Nugent, of the Berkeley lab, believe this expansion may be due to the presence of a mysterious "dark energy" which pushes things away from each other, the opposite of what gravity does.
. . The exact definition of "dark energy" remains elusive, but it behaves more like energy than matter: it cannot be brought to rest. It is unseen, and therefore dark, and has repulsive gravity, Turner said. Beyond that, it is something of a mystery.
. . Whatever it is, there appears to be a lot of it, the scientists said: possibly 65% of the universe could be composed of dark energy.

More than half of all stars are part of a binary system.
. . Muller figures Nemesis' orbit ranges from 1 to 3 light-years away from the Sun. On its closest approach, the lethal companion would pass through a vast, but sparsely populated halo of primitive comets called the Oort Cloud , which surrounds our solar system from beyond Neptune's orbit out to nearly a light-year away. (The Sun's nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.25 light-years away).
. . The orbit assumed for Nemesis is an unusual one, Muller admits. No star has ever been found to orbit so far from a companion.
. . But computer models developed by Muller and his colleagues predict that such an orbit must occur at some point in the evolution of most binary star systems.

The designated line between "stars" & "Brown Dwarfs" is a bit under 13 times the mass of Jupiter. Scientific shorthand for that designation is "sub 13Mjup." That mass is commonly used as a delineating line because it's the mass below which deuterium no longer fuses or burns in the core of a star due to insufficient temperature and pressure. Deuterium burns briefly in brown dwarfs, not in planets.

March 30, 01: A study in the journal Science suggests that if a new-found concentration of white dwarfs is typical for galaxies, then they could represent up to 35% of the "missing matter" sought by astronomers for 70 years. "This is a previously undetected population of stars, that may represent an important fraction of the dark matter in the galaxy", said Ben R. Oppenheimer, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.

. One camp of astronomers estimates the universe is expanding at a rate of about 50 km per second per megaparsec. Another comes up a Hubble Constant twice that fast. (A megaparsec (million parallel-seconds) equals 3.26 million light-years.)

3-29-00: In a recent study of a nearby star-hatchery in the Orion nebula, two English astronomers have discovered 13 rare "free-floating" objects: huge gas planets wandering through space without a star! They were looking for faint stars and brown dwarfs.
. "The objects are likely to be large gas planets similar in size to Jupiter and consisting primarily of hydrogen and helium", said Roche in an e-mail to SPACE.com.
. "The combination of luminosity and age (known to be between 0.3 and 2 million years old) gives us a fairly good measure of the mass", added Lucas. "Hence, we're pretty sure they're planets." Roche: "Undoubtedly more objects will follow." They formed "like stars, via the collapse of a cloud of cold gas", explained Lucas.
. Two years ago, Japanese astronomers detected two non-orbiting planet-like objects in the Chamaeleon nebula.
. JKH: Now we can speculate what these objects may be like. Unless they're very young and so generating heat by collapsing and by pulling in fresh material, they're completely frozen. They're nearly all H & He, so there's no radioactive heating, as in Earth.
. Imagine standing on the surface of an old Earth- sized one: you're standing ON the atmosphere --it's frozen, except for a few minor gasses (depending on what temp we assume). The poles are the same temp as the equator. It's always "night" (no sun to come up!) If there's a moon, it's always black, seen only as a darker disc over a few stars. There are no mountains or even hills--it would've cooled too fast to allow tectonics, & incoming accretions are gasses, not meteors. Shrinkage bumps would've been "plated over" by freezing gasses. If Earth diameter, gravity is vastly less, due to the lesser density. I love this one: if gasses are still coming in, it could literally "snow from outer space"! What else?

12-8-99: PLANETARY EVOLUTION. If a forming planetary disc is lightweight, planets form fairly slowly -- over 10 million years or so-- and looks something like the solar system.
. . But for a more heavyweight disc, more violent processes can occur more quickly and lead to a very different-looking system of planets.
. . Scientists found that gravitational force from a massive planet like Jupiter could cause parts of the planetary disc to collapse and form other gigantic and mostly gaseous planets from the fragments.
. . If planets are formed close together, the planetary system could become unstable and eject some planets into erratic orbits.

11-28-99: Six more jumbo-sized planets have been detected orbiting stars outside the solar system, and five of them are squarely in what astronomers call the habitable zone, with temperatures in one case around 108 degrees F., which could allow the existence of liquid water --a prerequisite for life.
The planets range in size from .7 to 6.0 times Jupiter's size--the largest planet in THE solar system. So, those planet's moons offer the possibility of liquid water and the eventual emergence of life. These planets orbit six different stars that are between 65 and 192 light years from Earth. The stars are similar in brightness, size and age to the Sun.

10-4-99: Hubble's found the first 5 MACHOs. (Massive Compact Halo Objects. Halo = rim of galaxy.) These old first-generation stars take up some of the "missing mass". Estimates go up to trillions of 'em per galaxy! WIMPs--Weakly Interacting Massive Particles--may be some of the rest. So the battle between the MACHOs and the WIMPs goes on!

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