Astronomers have turned up 20 new star systems in our corner of the Milky Way. The discoveries were made by the Research Consortium on Nearby Stars (RECONS) using the parallax method. The angles to various stars were measured at different times in the year – when the Earth is on opposite sides of the Sun. The closer a star is, the more its position will shift in the sky. This new batch of stars included the 23rd and 24th closest stars to the Earth.
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What’s Up this Week: November 13 – November 19, 2006
Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Here’s the week you’ve been waiting for… It’s almost time for the annual Leonid meteor shower! Although it won’t reach its peak until later this week, there will still be plenty to explore as we look at everything from the Andromeda family to the mighty M13. Time to get out your binoculars or telescopes, because…
Here’s what’s up!
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Podcast: Measuring Distance in the Universe
You hear distances all the time in astronomy. This star is 10 light-years away; that galaxy is 50 million light-years away; that Big Bang over there happened 13.7 billion years ago. But how did astronomers actually figure out how far away everything is? It’s not a single measuring stick. Instead, astronomers have built up a series of overlapping measuring tools (yes, we’re calling supernovae and variable stars “tools”), which take us from right around the corner to very ends of the Universe. Get out your ruler… no, the bigger one… never mind… just listen.
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Photos of Mercury’s Transit
I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t able to watch the Mercury transit directly. Fortunately, our hardworking friends in the Bad Astronomy/Universe Today Forum were outside with telescopes and cameras rolling. There are some still photographs, some mosaics of the transit, and some movies.
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Saturn’s Golden Rings
Nothing but rings in this Cassini photograph. NASA’s spacecraft captured this beautiful image of Saturn’s outer B and inner A rings. The colour of the rings looks more golden now than earlier in the mission because the Cassini’s angle to the rings has changed. This view has a high phase angle, towards the unlit side of the rings. Cassini took this image on September 29, 2006 when it was approximately 1.829 million kilometers (1.137 million miles) from Saturn.
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Contact Lost With Mars Global Surveyor
NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor has failed to check in with Earth for more than a week, causing concerns at the space agency. The last communication with the spacecraft was on November 2, when managers sent commands to get the spacecraft to adjust its solar arrays to better track the Sun. They received data back that there was a problem with the motor that drives the array, so they used a backup motor. Nothing has been heard from the spacecraft since. Engineers think the spacecraft performed the maneuver, and oriented its entire body towards the Sun, decreasing its ability to communicate back with Earth. The spacecraft was about to celebrate 10 years in space on November 7, 2006.
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A Huge Storm on Saturn’s South Pole
This photograph shows a swirling vortex around Saturn’s southern pole. This “hurricane” is approximately 8,000 km (5,000 miles) across, and has a well-developed eye ringed by clouds. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft had the perfect perspective when it took this photograph, seeing right down into the storm, and capturing the shadows cast by the surrounding clouds. This funnel of clouds allows scientists to look deeper into Saturn’s atmosphere than anywhere else on the planet.
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Maybe the Moon Isn’t Quite Dead Yet
Most scientists believe that the Moon hasn’t seen any volcanic activity in billions of years, but there could be new evidence that volcanic gasses are continuing to vent out onto the lunar surface. A new story published in the journal Nature explains how researchers found a region on the Moon that looks freshly deposited, with very few impact craters. Another view, which actually reveals the surface minerals, shows that the region hasn’t been weathered nearly as much as the surrounding environment.
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Proton Launches ARABSAT Broadcast Satellite
A Russian Proton rocket lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome Wednesday, carrying a ARABSAT BADR-4 broadcast satellite. The Proton lifted off at 20:01 UTC (3:01 pm EST), and placed the BADR-4 satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit a few minutes later. The satellite is a Eurostar E2000+ model, and will provide voice, broadband and television services the Middle East and North Africa region.
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Spitzer and Hubble View Orion
This beautiful photograph is of a region in the Orion Nebula called the Trapezium. It was taken by merging images together from two of the Great Observatories: Hubble and Spitzer. The swirls of green are ultraviolet and visible images revealed by Hubble, while the reds and oranges are infrared detected by Spitzer. At the heart of the photograph lurk 4 massive stars, each of which is 100,000 times brighter than our own Sun. The nebula is located about 1,500 light years from the Earth, and can be seen in small telescopes or binoculars.
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