Hi gang,

Don't know if any of you subscribe to this
(http://skyandtelescope.com/shopatsky/emailsubscribe.asp) but for those that
don't, I found this particular issue to be packed with very interesting
astro news.

Best regards,
Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: bulletins@... [mailto:bulletins@...]
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 9:06 AM
To: swanson.michael@...
Subject: S&T's Weekly News Bulletin for Jan. 13

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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - January 13, 2006 * * *

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Welcome to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin. Images, the full stories abridged
here, and other enhancements are on our Web site, SkyandTelescope.com, at
the URLs provided. (If the links don't work directly, just paste them into
your Web browser.) Clear skies!

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This week more than 3,000 astronomers from around the world have gathered
in Washington, DC for the 207th meeting of the American Astronomical
Society. The conference is the world's largest gathering of professional
astronomers ever held. Below are some of the announced research findings.

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SPINNING PULSAR SMASHES RECORD

If spinning amusement-park rides make you feel uncomfortably dizzy, then
avoid the recently discovered pulsar Terzan 5ad. A team of radio
astronomers has found that this celestial flywheel rotates 716 times per
second -- smashing a record that has stood since 1982 making it the
fastest-spinning natural macroscopic object known in the universe. The
previous record holder, which by coincidence was also the first
millisecond pulsar discovered, spins "only" 642 times per second.
Terzan 5ad (formally known as PSR J1748-2446ad) belongs to a class known
as millisecond pulsars. These bizarre objects are neutron stars (the
ultradense cores of massive stars) that take only a few thousandths of a
second to complete one rotation -- a feat the Sun needs about 27 days to
accomplish.

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1659_1.asp

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VEGA MYSTERY SOLVED; RED DWARF MYSTERY GROWS

Astronomers have finally figured out the long-standing mystery of why
Vega, the fifth-brightest star in the night sky, is brighter than it ought
to be. Using a linked array of telescopes to gain extremely high
resolution, they measured brightnesses and temperatures across different
parts of Vega's face. They got readings that no one expected, but that
turn out to put Vega's problems neatly in order.

Meanwhile, another group using the same facility has discovered that red
dwarfs, the most common stars in the universe, are significantly larger
than was long thought.

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1657_1.asp

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PROBING POLARIS

Of the countless stars in the sky, only a handful are known on a
first-name basis. The most famous of the bunch has to be Polaris, the
North Star. No other naked-eye star hovers closer to the celestial north
pole. But this 2nd-magnitude star holds secrets not visible to the naked
eye: it's actually a triple-star system, and, at a distance of just 430
light-years, it's the brightest Cepheid variable in the sky.

Polaris's larger sibling, Polaris B, has been known for centuries. Some 18
arcseconds from the North Star, it was first spotted by famed astronomer
William Herschel in 1780 and can be seen through modest amateur
instruments. The much closer partner, Polaris Ab, an otherwise nondescript
solar-type star, had only been recorded by spectrometers and managed to
avoid being photographed -- until now.

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1655_1.asp

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MORE EVIDENCE THAT BLACK HOLES ARE FOR REAL

A team of astronomers announced Monday compelling new evidence that black
holes exist in nature, and are not just the concoction of theorists and
science-fiction writers with overactive imaginations.
The team, led by Ron Remillard (MIT), studied 31 binary systems thought to
harbor either a black hole or a neutron star. All of these systems are
known as X-ray binaries because gas from a stellar companion streams onto
its compact partner. As the material spirals inward at increasing speeds,
it heats up and emits torrents of X-rays.

But Remillard's study showed a critical difference between the 18 systems
thought to harbor black holes, and the 13 suspected to contain neutron
stars....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1656_1.asp

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FEEDING THE MONSTER

An international team has peered deep into the heart of an active galaxy,
giving astronomers their best view yet of how streams of gas feed the
ravenous monster black holes that lurk in galactic cores.
Kambiz Fathi (Rochester Institute of Technology), working with colleagues
in Brazil, Chile, and Italy, combined the Hubble Space Telescope's
high-resolution imaging with the spectroscopic power of the 8-meter Gemini
South Telescope to probe the central regions of NGC 1097. This large
spiral galaxy lies 47 million light-years away in the southern
constellation Fornax.

With Hubble, Fathi and his colleagues could trace three spiral arms
winding all the way from the outer edge of the galaxy to within 10
light-years of the supermassive black hole at its center....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1654_1.asp

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THE INFRARED HELIX

Some 650 light-years away, deep in the constellation Aquarius, lies the
Helix Nebula, one of the most beautiful stellar corpses ever photographed.
In visible light, the nebula -- gases shed by a dying Sun-like star --
glows with a gorgeous rainbow of colors. But some of the most important
clues to the Helix's structure come in the form of light that the human
eye cannot see.

Enter the Spitzer Space Telescope and its infrared eyes. Yesterday, at
this week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, DC,
Joseph Hora (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) released a new
view of this iconic celestial fixture....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1653_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

LIGO Ready to Observe

In November 2005 the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory
(LIGO) reached the sensitivity level required to listen for the
gravitational waves caused by the collision of two black holes, the
coalescence of two neutron stars, or the supernova explosions of stars.
The project recently began a two-year observing campaign. While it's
unclear if the team will hear anything soon, estimates for event rates
suggest that LIGO should make at least one detection during this time. "We
believe discovery is right around the corner," says noted cosmologist
Michael Turner (University of Chicago/National Science Foundation)....

A Different Type of Supernova?

By analyzing the atmosphere of a suspected pre-supernova white-dwarf star,
astronomers are gaining new insight into how and why the stars explode as
they do. The team led by Edward Sion (Villanova University) used the
Hubble Space Telescope to look at a helium-rich binary star system and
spectroscopically determine the rate at which helium pours from the larger
star onto the white dwarf. They also analyzed the white dwarf's
atmosphere, spin rate, and mass. Conventional thinking says that when a
white dwarf accumulates 1.4 Suns of mass, it will explode as a Type Ia
supernova. However, these new observations suggest that a white dwarf can
go supernova before hitting the mass limit....

Seeing Not-So Ancient Supernovae

When a star goes supernova, it blasts away its outer gases into an
expanding shell. Like ripples on a pond, those gases expand outward and
eventually dissipate out of sight. But using a new image-processing
technique, a team of astronomers led by Armin Rest (National Optical
Astronomy Observatory) has found several light echoes from blasts that
happened several hundred years ago....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1658_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Full Moon on Saturday, January 14.
* Watch an artificial "meteor." The Stardust space capsule, returning from
Comet Wild 2, will streak into Earth's atmosphere over northern California
and Nevada on its way to landing in northwestern Utah. The reentry should
be visible from Seattle to south of San Francisco and as far east as Salt
Lake City, weather permitting. Stardust should reach a peak brilliance
several times brighter than Venus around 1:56 a.m. Pacific Standard Time,
2:56 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, on the morning of the 15th.
* Saturn (magnitude -0.2, in Cancer) rises in the east-northeast in
twilight, below Castor and Pollux. By 9 p.m. it's posing high in the east.
Binoculars show the Beehive star cluster just above it.

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance/article_110_1.asp

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