Although Sycorax and Caliban are not Shakespeare's most famous characters, they may soon join a few of their literary brethren in orbit around Uranus. Brett Gladman of the University of Toronto and his colleagues, who discovered two new Uranium moons in September 1997 have proposed naming them after the witch Sycorax and her beastly son, Caliban from the Shakespearen play The Tempest. The names will likely be approved by the International Astronomical Union, which assigns official names to all objects and features beyond earth. For names on earth, come to Tamil Nadu - any politician will do it for you, at a tiny cost!
Io, the Dynamo
The first volcanoes seen erupting beyond earth turned up on Io, a moon of Jupiter that is stretched and heated by a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and that planet's other large moons. The two Voyager spacecraft in 1979 and the Galileo spacecraft in the past three years photographed Io's volcanic plumes in detail and, along with ground-based infrared telescopes, monitored intense hotspots on the satellite's surface. The discoveries are important, in part, because life may have arisen on Earth near volcanically active rifts on ocean floors.
No-name killer
A now famous extra-terrestrial citizen of the universe that actually did strike earth has no name. Scientists don't know for sure whether it was an asteroid or a comet, but it hit the Yucatan of eastern Mexico. A Nobel laureate, physicist Luis Alvarez, and his geologist son Walter announced in 1979 that they had found abnormally high levels of iridium, which is a thousand times more abundant in primitive meteorites than in earth's crust, in a highly unexpected place - a narrow band of sedimentary rock. The layer is known as the K-T boundary and is the chronological boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary eras about 65 million years ago, the time of the abrupt disappearance of the dinosaurs and many other species and many other species of life. But Fox Mulder says it was probably the first Noah's ark and all the species in that era now flourish in an alien galaxy, a few UFO stops away from the Solar System ;)
Gravitational Lenses
Hold a drinking glass up to a single light and you will see multiple lights through the glass (nothing spooky here!). That is similar to the gravitational lensing effect that astronomers have seen in the past 25 years. In many of those cases the lights were from quasars, bright centers of distant galaxies whose gravity "bends" space time, as predicted by Albert Einstein.
Deuterium
Hydrogen, with one proton and one electron, is the simplest element. Just after the Big Bang, neutrons occasionally stuck to hydrogen nuclei to form a slightly heavier isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. Cosmologists realize that the amount of deuterium created in the Big Bang would indicate how much ordinary matter the universe contained. In 1997, astrophysicists Scott Burles and David Tytler measured the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in the primordial universe: It suggested that most mass in the universe is not of the ordinary variety but is instead some mysterious kind of invisible, exotic dark matter.