Dec 4, 2008 Students Discover Unique Planet (ESO)
The students were testing a method of investigating the light fluctuations of thousands of stars in the OGLE [Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment] database in an automated way. The brightness of one of the stars was found to decrease for two hours every 2.5 days by about one percent. Follow-up observations, taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, confirmed that this phenomenon is caused by a planet passing in front of the star, blocking part of the starlight at regular intervals.
According to Ignas Snellen, supervisor of the research project, the discovery was a complete surprise. “The project was actually meant to teach the students how to develop search algorithms. But they did so well that there was time to test their algorithm on a so far unexplored database. At some point they came into my office and showed me this light curve. I was completely taken aback!“
[A mirror for the OGLE raw data may be found here. The research paper describing the discovery is on arXiv -jnr]
Nov 18, 2008 Early warning of dangerous asteroids and comets (MIT News Office)
Silicon chips developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory are at the heart of a new survey telescope that will soon provide a more than fivefold improvement in scientists’ ability to detect asteroids and comets that could someday pose a threat to the planet.
Sep 2, 2008 Giant Furnace Opens to Reveal ‘Perfect’ LSST Mirror Blank (LSST Corp)
“The single-piece primary and tertiary mirror blank cast for the LSST is “perfect”, say project astronomers and engineers…The LSST, or Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, a large survey telescope being built in northern Chile, requires three large mirrors to give crisp images over a record large field of view…The LSST will be the widest, fastest, deepest eye of the new digital age when it begins science operations from Cerro Pachón, Chile, in 2015. It will provide time-lapse digital imaging across the entire available night sky every three days, mapping the structure of our dynamic universe and exploring the nature of dark matter and dark energy.”
Sep 1, 2008 Impact Objects (Tonthat/Maui News)
“Atop the summit of Haleakala, the world’s largest digital camera is taking pictures of the night sky as part of a sky-surveying project to detect space objects that could threaten Earth.
“Just the first phase of a state-of-the-art astronomy research program, the Panoramic Survey Telescope And Rapid Response System – Pan-STARRS – is the first of the next generation of sky surveying systems.”
Aug 31, 2008 Most distant, massive galaxy cluster discovered to date holds dark energy clue (Yeager/Science News)
A new cosmic crowd has captured the distance and heavyweight titles for galaxy clusters discovered deep in the universe. The record-breaker sits billions of light-years from Earth and weighs about a thousand times the mass of the Milky Way, astronomers report in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Aug 26, 2008 NASA Renames Observatory for Fermi, Reveals Entire Gamma-Ray Sky (NASA/PR Newswire)
“The LAT [Large Area Telescope] team today unveiled an all-sky image showing the glowing gas of the Milky Way, blinking pulsars, and a flaring galaxy billions of light-years away. The map combines 95 hours of the instrument’s “first light” observations. A similar image, produced by NASA’s now-defunct Compton Gamma-ray Observatory, took years of observations to produce.The image shows gas and dust in the plane of the Milky Way glowing in gamma rays due to collisions with accelerated nuclei called cosmic rays.”
Aug 26, 2008 The rough guide to the universe (Gray/Telegraph.co.uk)
“After more than eight years of relentlessly scanning the heavens and recording every chink of visible light, astronomers have finally finished the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, producing a three-dimensional colour map that covers a quarter of the night sky.
It has determined the exact position and classification of more than 200 million celestial bodies, including a million galaxies and 100,000 quasars, distant light sources which are among the most powerful objects in the universe. It has also produced a wealth of scientific discoveries that have helped to shape our understanding of the universe.”
Aug 25, 2008 Massive galaxy cluster to shed light on cosmic lumpiness (Courtland/New Scientist)
“Astronomers have found the most massive distant cluster of galaxies yet seen. A search of the rest of the sky for such objects could help measure the lumpiness of the universe and the effects of dark energy, the mysterious entity that is causing space to expand ever faster…Lamer and colleagues discovered the cluster while combing through archived X-ray data from Europe’s XMM-Newton observatory. The catalogue contained some 20,000 large X-ray sources and covered 1% of the sky. But the team found only one massive cluster candidate in the distant universe.”
Aug 25, 2008 Sky survey yields new cosmic haul (Lintott/BBC)
“Astronomers looking through the data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the world’s largest survey of galaxies, have found a new haul of objects closer to home – including one with a potentially exotic origin….By searching through a survey region known as Stripe 82, a team led by Dr Andrew Becker of the University of Washington, has discovered almost 50 new asteroid-sized bodies in the outer regions of our Solar System.”
Aug 19, 2008 Astronomers Find Unusual New Denizen Of The Solar System (SDSS/Science Daily)
“A ‘minor planet’ with the prosaic name 2006 SQ372 is just over two billion miles from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune. But this lump of ice and rock is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, according to a team of researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II).”
Aug 18, 2008 The winding Milky Way (source: SDSS)
“The halo of stars that envelops the Milky Way is like a river delta crisscrossed by stellar streams large and small, according to new data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II)…In addition to stellar streams, astronomers searching the SDSS data have found 14 surviving dwarf companions of the Milky Way…”
