Dave Reneke's

 'WORLD of SPACE and ASTRONOMY'

Weird, Wild & Breaking News Stories in Space and Astronomy from around the World 24/7 delivered free every week with regular updates as they happen.

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Here’s a selection of Astronomy/Space related stories you may find interesting. Be sure to sign up for your own copy of Astro Space News. I absolutely do not disclose your address to anyone! There is no cost and no obligation for this service. Anyone can subscribe by completing the opt in form just over there on the right … see it, do it now! We work 24/7/365 to report the most relevant ‘Astro-Space’ news back to you … virtually as it breaks. Bookmark this page and check back regularly.

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If you are interested, an interview with astronomer, writer, educator and public lecturer representing Australasian Science Magazine and Editor of Astro Space News, Dave Reneke(Astro-Dave) can be arranged by contacting Dave by Phone/Fax(02) 65 85 2260 Mobile: 0400 636 363 or email Dave for an instant reply to davereneke@gmail.com. David is well experienced talking to the media and presents information in an easy to understand, up to date and informative manner. Interviews can be on any subject, tailored to your requirements.

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Australasian Science is dedicated to Australian and New Zealand science, providing a unique local perspective on scientific developments and issues that other science magazines can’t match. Check out the latest issue NOW: http://www.australasianscience.com.au/  For school & institution rates please contact Control Publications on 03 9500 0015. Fax: (03) 9500 0255 Email science@control.com.au

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 LETTERS TO DAVE

 Your letters are welcome on any subject covered by the scope of this newsletter or any aspect of astronomy/space in general. All letters requesting help or advice will be answered personally by me.

 Dave,

A slip of the tongue this morning.  You explained, pushed for time that a ring round the moon results from water vapour in the atmosphere. Being a gas it is neither reflective nor refractive.  Cirrus clouds are ice crystals (a mate of mine professes to believe that ice could not stay up there).  Other clouds are liquid water droplets.  Sorry to be fussy but this is on my mind because a Doctor of Science I know has taken the view that water vapour is a more potent greenhouse agent than CO2.  I see on Google that many others take this view.  water vapour and clouds as you know are different states of matter with different physical properties.  Water vapour is invisible, which water and ice are not.

Regards, Bob F.  B.Pharm.

Bob

Yes you are right by gum!!!  I should have remembered. Clouds and ice of course, as you said, are different from each other.  I'm going to run this as a story in next this newsletter – it is very interesting and a lot of people might like the right answer. Many thanks for pointing this out.

Dave

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Hi David.

I really need advice on buying a telescope.  I have found one that seems to be good.  It is a Celestron AstroMaster 130 EQ.  It is 130 mm and comes with a 20 and 10 mm eyepiece.  It has a German Equatorial Mount with setting circles.  It also has a perfectly aligned find scope.  It's around $500 (Australian) so I want to be sure it's a good deal.  Thank you.

Max S.

Hi Max

Look this is a good brand telescope and has desirable tracking features that are always welcome.  BUT it is a relatively small telescope power- wise mate.  You will get excellent views of most celestial objects, especially the Moon, but you'll be limited in how much you can magnify them. The planets will be small through the scope but you'll see the bands of Jupiter, it's Moons and the rings of Saturn BUT only as small images.  As long as you understand that mirror size determines how good the object looks and HOW BIG it will become as you increase magnification.  I sell a similar one that hasn't got a few of the features and it's a lot cheaper.  Both scopes will give you the magnifying same capability OK. I need to know what it's to be used for – a kid, you , only now and then?  OR is this a scope you want to get into this hobby seriously?  My advice to anyone is go for aperture (mirror size) because after a short time most buyers want to upgrade to a bigger scope – we call this 'aperture fever.' I'd point you to something like this that admittedly hasn't got the fancy stuff but HAS got grunt.  It s depends on what you want from the scope.  By the way all these scopes we've discussed here are no good for land use OK. This is where I'd point someone like you till you learned more.  Go to my site and see the Guan Sheng GS-680 8" 200mm x 1200mm Dob!  http://www.davidreneke.com/recommended-telescopes-for-beginners about halfway down.  It's Dobsonian mount so make sure you understand how that works.

Get back to me.

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Hi Dave , this is granny Robyn. 

I was listening to you on radio last night, so I signed up for your newsletter.  I enjoy letting my G-kids know about space happenings .  so what did you say last night… some special happening this month was it a shooting star ?  Will your newsletter tell us about this and when it will happen.  You also said we can see it with a naked eye. 
Thanks Dave .  Regards Robyn

HI Robyn

Thanks for listening and thanks too for the nice comments.  It is Mars I was talking about – have a look at my newsletter www.davidreneke.com and see the 'What's in the Sky This Month section halfway down the 'astro-space news' page.  It will tell you all about it.

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David

I heard your broadcast this morning with Trevor Chappell on the ABC.  One caller remarked how he saw a bright round light traveling at the speed of an aircraft, for 1-11/2 minutes at around 4am.  I was wondering if that might have been an early morning orbit of the space station.  Some of its orbits are morning and later in the month they are evening. Thanks for a very insightful broadcast.  Graham H.

Hi Graham Yeah…  logical …  why didn't I think of that at the time?  You are more than probably right – it fits the description sure enough.  My complaining friend Perry would have jumped right on that had he been a regular reader of this newsletter. Thanks for the email.

Dave 
   

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THIS WEEK'S TOP STORY

 

New Hubble Images Show Pluto is Changing

Pluto-philes (and astronomers, too) have always bemoaned the fact that the best image of the principal dwarf planet wase just a fuzzy, pixelized haze.  Bemoan no more.  The most detailed look to date of the entire surface of Pluto has been constructed from hundreds of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.  The images were taken during 2002 to 2003, and it took four years of computer crunching and software tweaking to create the global images.  Surprisingly, the images show Pluto changed noticeably during the two-year photo shoot; the dwarf planet's color became "redder," and astronomers could see Pluto's ice sheets were shifting.

"These images represent a true-color appearance of what you would see if you were near Pluto, comparable to looking at our own Moon with the naked eye," said principal investigator Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute.  "We now know we're looking at something that has the biggest surface changes of any object in our solar system." The pictures show nitrogen ice growing and shrinking, getting brighter in the north and darker in the south.

Buie and planet hunter Mike Brown from Caltech introduced the Hubble images during a teleconference with reporters today, and emphasized how surprised they were with the changes seen on Pluto in just a relatively short period of time.  Even accounting for seasonal changes, seasons can last 120 years in some regions of Pluto.

 The top picture was taken in 1994 by the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera.  The bottom image was taken in 2002-2003 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys.  The dark band at the bottom of each map is the region that was hidden from view at the time the data were taken.

They said the images underscore that Pluto is not simply a ball of ice and rock but a dynamic world that undergoes dramatic atmospheric changes.  While they believe the changes are driven by the seasons, it may mostly come from how quickly things can change on Pluto.  The seasons are propelled as much by the planet's 248-year elliptical orbit as its axial tilt — unlike Earth where the tilt alone drives seasons.  On Pluto spring transitions to polar summer quickly in the northern hemisphere because Pluto is moving faster along its orbit when it is closer to the Sun.

"If Earth had such an extreme orbit, and we were experiencing a nice springtime day with 60-70 degree F temperatures, as the orbit changed it could suddenly drop to -90 degrees F," said Brown.There is also a mysterious bright spot on the center of Pluto, which has been observed in earlier images.  But the spot is unusually rich in carbon monoxide frost.

The astronomers said Pluto is so small and distant that the task of resolving the surface is as challenging as trying to see the markings on a soccer ball 40 miles away.  Buie said we won't have a better look at Pluto until the New Horizon's spacecraft is six months away from the dwarf planet in 2015.

The images were taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys on HST, and the 348 images taken in 2002 and 2003 were the last ones taken of Pluto with high enough resolution to be useful.  "I had time allocated two years ago to look at Pluto, which came just three or four weeks after the high resolution camera failed," Buie.  "That was very disappointing."

But the images do show Pluto is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades.  Astronomers use the word "red" to mean it reflects more red light than blue or green light.  To the human eye, Pluto has a yellowish-orange color, and is about 20% redder than it used to be.  "It's not as red as the surface of Mars, but more red than Io," Buie said.

Red is usually associated with carbon.  The astronomers said there is also methane, which is not usually stable in an environment like Pluto's. Someone suggested that Pluto is reddening because of its recent demotion from full planethood.  "Yes, people have said that Pluto is mad at me," said Brown, who has the nickname of the "Pluto killer" because he discovered other Kuiper Belt objects which led to the new class of dwarf planets.

"For a long time Pluto was this lonely oddball that we didn't have anything else to compare it with," said Brown.  "Understanding this all as a new class of objects is a much more interesting way of looking at the solar system and it is quite a bit of fun, too."
 

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      MORE ASTRO-SPACE NEWS   

 Moon-Junk May Be Preserrved  As Historical Resource.

When the Apollo 11 astronauts blasted off from the moon, they left behind not just the small steps of men but a giant pile of equipment and junk for all of mankind. 

Some of the 5,000 pounds of stuff Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin abandoned at Tranquility Base was purposeful: a seismic detector to record moonquakes and meteorite impacts; a laser-reflection device to make some precise distance measurements between the Earth and moon; a U.S.  flag and commemorative plaque.  Some was unavoidable: Apollo 11's lunar module descent stage wasn't designed to be carted back home, for instance.

The rest was cast aside to lighten the load of the Eagle lunar module and allow for takeoff.  To compensate for the weight of moon rocks and soil samples, the astronauts gave the heave-ho to more than 100 items, creating a veritable yard sale of high technology and lowly debris.  Space boots and portable life support systems.  The arm rests from their cockpit seats.  A hammer, scoops, cameras and containers.  Tethers and antennas.  Empty food bags and bags filled with human waste.Low-impact campers they were not.

"They were told to jettison things that weren't important.  So they starting tossing stuff," said Beth O'Leary, an assistant professor of anthropology at New Mexico State University and a leader in the emerging field of space heritage and archaeology.  "They were essentially told, 'Here's eight minutes.  Create an archaeology site.' " There are countless places on Earth that have been awarded protection to preserve their historic or cultural importance.  The moon has none. But that may be about to change.

California is poised to become the first state to register the items at Tranquility Base as an official State Historical Resource.  If the State Historical Resources Commission approves the idea at a meeting in Sacramento, Calif., on Friday, it would be a victory for scientists who want to build support to have Tranquility Base designated a United Nations World Heritage Site in advance of what they believe will be unmanned trips to the moon by private groups, and even someday by tourists.  Proposals to place the items on historic registries in Texas and New Mexico are planned for later this year.

 "There's a really good chance that we will be up there again in the next decades," said Jay Correia, a California state historian who manages the registration process.  "It's one of the most important historic events in the history of mankind.  A first glance, it seems bizarre to even talk about it.  But we have to talk about it.  Can you imagine someone driving a cart over Neil Armstrong's first footprint?  Wouldn't that be terrible?"

Because of the moon's lack of an atmosphere, Armstrong's left boot print remains in the gray powder just where he planted it at 7:56 p.m. Pacific time on July 20, 1969 — a mind-blowing moment watched by hundreds of millions of television viewers worldwide.

How to preserve such a treasure is a top priority for the space heritage movement.  A loose group of engineers, historians and anthropologists, they regard the Space Age the way other scientists do the Stone Age.  It is an epoch of technological advancement and human exploration that will be studied for generations to come. More than 27,000 tons of rockets, probes and satellites have been hurled into space.  The moon is the grandmother's attic of space junk, home to remnants from six manned Apollo missions and unmanned missions launched by the United States, the former Soviet Union, the European Space Agency, Japan and India.

"We lose a lot of stuff every day on Earth because of neglect, vandalism and erosion," O'Leary said.  "As things are destroyed, we lose part of our knowledge about the past.  On the moon, if you take the long view — say, 100 years out — there's a good risk that we will lose the information that is sitting there." O'Leary is one of the founders of the Lunar Legacy Project, which cataloged the items at Tranquility Base by scouring government archives. She was drawn to the issue in 1999 after a student asked her an intriguing question: Can federal preservation laws be applied to the moon? The short answer: It's complicated.

The United States is a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.  While its delightful name suggests a truce between Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless, its provisions are serious and clear.  Nations own the objects they put into space, no matter where they land.  But they cannot claim sovereignty over any part of space. Discarded artifacts on the moon hold plenty of useful scientific information.  Apollo 12's astronauts understood this.  When they landed near the Surveyor 3 lunar probe, which had been on the moon for more than two years, they removed hardware from the craft, including its video camera, and brought them back for analysis.  The camera is on display at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

Of the approximately 100 items from Apollo 11 at the Smithsonian, only the space suits worn by Armstrong and Aldrin and some containers logged any moon-time. There are only two people who have first-hand knowledge of how items were chosen to be discarded.  Aldrin, who at 80 is a globe-trotting speaker, entrepreneur and author, says much of it was planned in advance.  But plenty of stuff was discarded on the fly.

Items he regrets leaving are his and Armstrong's lunar boots — tossed because of contamination concerns."My wife constructed a title for a movie or a book — 'They Left Their Boots on the Moon,' " Aldrin said. He says any move to preserve Tranquility Base should be done in concert with a badly needed rethinking of international space law to create "a unified space vision" on issues of future exploration, commercial development, property rights and security. "Certainly there is value there from a historical and cultural perspective," Aldrin said. Well, maybe not everything there."You think anyone wants the urine bags?" he said with a laugh.

Los Angeles Times.

 Griffin – Nasa CAN Afford Top Go Back To The Moon 

Ex-NASA boss Mike Griffin says we can do three Apollo-scale projects over the next 50 years without increasing the NASA budget.  It sounds too good to be true – and it is.  Griffin's analysis of NASA's past relies on questionable economics and his vision of the future includes political and technical impossibilities.

The March 14 2007 issue of Aviation Week contained an article by NASA Administrator Mike Griffin which apparently is the most detailed statement yet of his long-range plans. In this article and related press interviews, Griffin makes a case that NASA is not really as underfunded as many critics say, and that the US can afford three major space projects on the scale of Project Apollo over the next 50 years without major budget increases.

Specifically, he argues that a steady budget of about 14 billion FY2000 dollars per year can comfortably accommodate the Moon landing, Moon base, and Mars landing programs proposed by President Bush in February 2004.

There has been surprisingly little discussion of this key article.  Possibly many space advocates suspect that the news is too good to be true. After all, on March 16, Griffin appeared in person on Capitol Hill to argue for a major increase in NASA funding of exactly the kind he had claimed was unnecessary in this article.  This contradiction should have tipped us all off that the AvWeek article is not a serious analysis.

 One has to ask: Is this really what Mike Griffin sees when he looks to the future?  Is he really using these fantastic cost estimates in his planning?  It seems unlikely.  He has seven college degrees and a staff that could tell him very precisely what inflation factors he should be using. The only possible explanation is that this article is just a piece of propaganda intended to boost the failing support for the Vision for Space Exploration in the pro-space community.  This is fully consistent with Griffin's previous experience in pseudo-programs like SDI, DC-X, and X-33 which were mostly publicity exercises.

A bigger question is: why do so many space cadets still worship Griffin and believe everything he says, without the normal level of skepticism directed at the statements and actions of political appointees?  The answer is that Griffin is a master at divining what we want to hear and telling us exactly that.  We are so accustomed to seeing bland organization men at the helm of NASA that we have been blinded by the sheer novelty of an Administrator who shares our romantic vision of space.  We need to open our eyes and demand some hard-nosed rational planning to back up that vision.

SpaceDaily

Wondering What Causes a Ring Around The Moon?  Here's the answer.

The moon can produce interesting optical effects when conditions are right.  The most common of which are moon rings, moon bows, which are similar to rainbows, moon dogs and moon pillars. 

A rainbow is produced when sunlight is refracted through water droplets – A similar effect is produced when moon light refracts through ice crystals.  left is a photograph of this interesting phenomena. 

The ring around the Moon is caused by the refraction of Moonlight (which of course is reflected sunlight) from ice crystals in the upper atmosphere.  The shape of the ice crystals results in a focusing of the light into a ring.  Since the ice crystals typically have the same shape, namely a hexagonal shape, the Moon ring is almost always the same size. Less typical are the halos that may be produced by different angles in the crystals.  They can create halos with an angle of 46 degrees.

Moon Ring Weather Folklore Folklore has it that a ring around the moon signifies bad weather is coming, and in many cases this may be true.  So how can rings around the moon be a predictor of weather to come?  The ice crystals that cover the halo signify high altitude, thin cirrus clouds that normally precede a warm front by one or two days.  Typically, a warm front will be associated with a low pressure system which is commonly referred to as a storm. It is believed that the number of stars within a moon halo indicate the number days before bad weather will arrive.  Give it a try the next time you observe a moon halo.

Rings Around The Sun - The same phenomena that causes lunar halos can also be observed around the sun.  A few photos of solar halos using a Coolpix 995 digital camera.  NOTICE: Never look at or photograph the sun directly.  

 Iran Launches Rat and Turtles Into Space

Iran hailed last Wednesday the successful launch of a home-built satellite carrying a rat, turtles and worms, amid Western concerns Tehran is using its nuclear and space industries to develop atomic and ballistic weapons. Iranian state television said the Kavoshgar 3 (Explorer) rocket carried a capsule containing "live animals" — marking Iran's first experiment in sending living creatures into space.

Television footage showed a white rat on its back in a container with tubes protruding from its mouth.  Two other containers contained respectively several dark worms and small turtles. The United States branded the rocket launch a "provocative act" as some observers raised fears the craft could be used to develop ballistic missiles, as well as to launch satellites.

White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton said that the Obama administration, which is locked in a nuclear showdown with Tehran, was still checking out reports of the launch. But he added such a move by Iran would be a "provocative act." France said it had received news of the launch with "great concern."

"This announcement can only reinforce the concerns of the international community as Iran in parallel develops a nuclear programme that has no identifiable civil aims," a spokesman said in Paris. Iran's ISNA news agency said the capsule carrying the creatures returned to earth safely after a U-shaped voyage as planned, but it did not elaborate on the condition of the animals.

"It is a great job that living organisms can be sent into space, we do experiments on them and they return to earth," President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said as he welcomed the launch. The ILNA news agency reported that Iranian Defence Minister Ahmad Vahidi said the "biological data of the animals will be sent to us for evaluation." State television showed footage of the rocket being fired from a desert launchpad leaving behind a thick plume of smoke. A few minutes later the grainy images showed the capsule detaching from the rocket and spinning in orbit.

The milk-bottle shaped rocket, emblazoned in blue with the words "Satellite Carrier Simorgh," is equipped to carry a 100-kilogram (220-pound) satellite 500 kilometres (310 miles) into orbit, the television report said. The 27-metre (90 foot) tall multi-stage rocket weighs 85 tonnes and its liquid fuel propulsion system has a thrust of up to 100 tonnes, the report added. Ahmadinejad said Iran was "going to send a satellite 500 kilometres up.  The next steps are 700 and 1,000 kilometres.  Everyone knows that reaching the 1,000 kilometre orbit allows you to reach all orbits."

The satellite launch and the unveiling of the new prototypes came as Iran marked "Space Technology Day" as part of celebrations for the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution. Iran launched its first home-built satellite, the Omid (Hope), in February last year to coincide with the 30th anniversary. In 2008, Iran fired two rockets into space — the Kavoshgar in February and the Kavoshgar 2 in November — but neither was carrying any payload.

The West suspects Iran of secretly trying to build an atomic bomb and fears the technology used to launch space rockets could be diverted into developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.Tehran denies having military goals for its space programme or its nuclear drive.
Space Daily

 Kansas 5-Year-Old Draws UFO After Reporting 'Round Plane With Bolts'

 A Kansas parent is wondering if their 5-year-old's comments about "a round plane with bolts" and subsequent drawing could be an actual UFO sighting, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) database.

The January 25 event occurred as the parent was driving their child home from school. The child made the comment about something she saw in the sky, but the parent, who was driving, was unable to view the object.

Two days later, the parent asked the child to make drawings of what she saw. (See image left.) 

The following is the unedited and as yet uninvestigated report filed with MUFON. Please keep in mind that most UFO reports can be explained as something natural or manmade. If Kansas MUFON investigates and reports back on this case, I will release an update.

"I was driving my daughter home from school. She says to me look daddy, a round plane with bolts! I really did not look because I was driving. When we got home I began asking her questions. It was over a house and slowly moving south she pointed out to me."

"What is really more bizzare to me is at age 5 I too saw my first UFO. That was the first time my daughter even mentioned or talked about UFOs. Two days later I asked her to draw me a picture of it. I was so amazed by this.I said draw me another. Almost a copy of the first one. I am so surprised because, like I said, never before did she ever know about UFOs."

 Xaminer.Com  

 Best Description Ever of How to Go to the Bathroom in Space

Astronauts say it is the most-asked question they get from people. There have been books written about it. Maybe because we all have to do it, everyone wants to know how it works in zero-gravity. I've lost count of the number of times in a presentation I've been asked this question… especially from high school kids. I'm glad this video came along - makes it a lot easier.:)

Below, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gives the best description ever of how it works to go to the bathroom in space. And he tells all in less than two minutes, too. 

 Universe Today

 

 India Looks To Global Effort For Manned Mars Mission

As a leading space-faring nation, India with its low-cost but high-end launch vehicle technology will be a part of the international consortium for the manned mission to Mars. The maiden human space flight to Mars would be a global mission through a consortium by 2030, a top Indian space official said Wednesday.

'Manned mission to Mars will be a global effort and will be undertaken by a consortium of space-faring nations,' Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman K.  Radhakrishnan told reporters. Noting that international collaboration and cooperation would be the order of the day in future space exploratory missions, Radhakrishnan said the global endeavour would be to put a man on the red planet by 2030.

'Since a human space flight to Mars is not only prohibitive, but also demanding as the journey alone would be about 250 days, the ambitious mission will pose scientific and technological challenges to all space agencies,' Radhakrishnan said on the margins of a an event.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the US and the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of space-faring nations in Europe, signed an agreement in October 2009 to expand collective capabilities, resources and expertise for exploration of Mars. As a leading space-faring nation, India with its low-cost but high-end launch vehicle technology will be a part of the international consortium for the manned mission to Mars.

'India will be associated with other space-faring agencies in the manned mission to Mars, with scientific experiments to be carried on the Martian surface,' Radhakrishnan said after releasing a book titled 'Moon Mission: Exploring the Moon with Chandrayaan-1'. The book on India's maiden unmanned lunar mission is authored by S.K.  Das, a former member (finance) of the space department.

Referring to the second lunar mission (Chandrayaan-2) scheduled for launch in 2012-13, the Indian space agency chief said it would repeat some of the experiments carried by Chandrayaan-1 and its unfinished task as it was aborted 10 months after its launch Oct 22, 2008. 'Chandrayaan-2 will land a Rover on the moon to collect samples and relay the data back to the earth,' Radhakrishnan noted.

 SpaceTravel

The Planets of Alpha Centauri: The Hunt for a Pandora

James Cameron’s new movie Avatar depicts a gas giant with a habitable moon, Pandora, around it.  Could there be real habitable planets orbiting among the three stars of the Alpha Centauri system?  What are the odds that a "Pandora," really exists?

With the diminishing odds that our solar system supports advanced forms of life, the nearest stars become ever more attractive candidates for discovery.  And among the stars with possible habitable planets is the Alpha Centauri triple star system, the closest star system at only 4.37 light years from our Sun.  Both Alpha Centauri A and B are stars very similar to our own Sun.

The distance to Alpha Centauri is so great that light from these stars takes more than four years to reach our Solar System.  The ringed planet Saturn seems a distant frontier to us at the moment BUT, the nearest star is almost 30,000 times farther away.

While Cameron was creating a fictional moon orbiting a gas giant circling Alpha Centauri A, several very real astronomers have focused in on Alpha Centauri as a potential zone for Earthlike planets.  Professor Debra Fischer of Yale University, currently working at the Cerro Tololo Inter- American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, is aiming the CTIO 1.5 meter telescope at both Alpha Centauri “A” and “B” as a part of a 5 year observation that will hopefully reveal planets as small as Mars.

Fisher is using the radial velocity method, which uses spectral measurements to detect variations in the speed that a star moves towards or away from Earth (any star with planets will move in its own small orbit around a common center of gravity).

In addition to Fischer’search, Michel Mayor’s team at the La Silla Southern Sky extrasolar Planet search Programme, is using instruments sensitive enough to detect a Centauri planet down to Mars size, depending on the stability of the stellar atmospheres.  We may well find one or more small, rocky worlds, at which point the question becomes whether or not such a planet could have oceans — we don’t know what close binaries may do to water delivery from asteroids and comets.  Whatever the case, though, a Centauri planet in the habitable zone would be a potent stimulus to earth-bound human imagination and an obvious target for interstellar probes of the future.

To the two ongoing hunts for planets around the Alpha Centauri stars the Centauri Dreams blog reports that we can now add a third.  John Hearnshaw (University of Canterbury, Christchurch) reports that the university’s Mt. John Observatory has begun a program to search for Earth -mass planets around Centauri A and B.  Although the observatory is heavily invested in microlensing technologies, the new efforts will put radial velocity methods to work using the Hercules spectrograph.

Daily Galaxy

 How Can I Find South Using The Southern Cross?

If you can find the Southern Cross – Crux by its astronomical name – you can easily find the South Celestial Pole (SCP) – an imaginary point in the sky directly above south.

Method 1

Imagine a line joining the two stars at the ‘head’ and the ‘foot’ of the cross. Extend the line out another four lengths from the foot of the cross – that’s the South Celestial Pole (SCP). Then look straight down from the SCP to the horizon – you've found south!

 

Method 2

Another slighty trickier – but more accurate – way of finding south is to use the Southern Cross AND the Pointer stars from the neighbouring constellation Centaurus.

Draw a line through the two stars at the 'head' and the 'foot' of the cross and extend it to the dark patch of the sky the same way as in the first method (line 1). Then join a line between the two Pointers (line 2). Find the middle of line 2 then draw a perpendicular line down toward line 1 until the lines meet.

The point at which the lines 1 and 3 intersect is the SCP. From there just look straight down to the horizon and you've found south.

Even though the Southern Cross moves around the sky during the year, the foot of the cross always points to the SCP – which is very handy if you've lost your compass or the sun's gone down!

Big Aussie Starhunt

 Self-Doubt Plagues Female Astronomers

Women in US astronomy graduate programmes are considerably more likely than men to fear being exposed for a lack of astronomy knowledge or ability, according to the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, Maryland, and the American Astronomical Association (AAS). 

The results, part of the first ever longitudinal study of astronomy graduate students in the United States, raise concerns that these fears have been driving women to leave the field in large numbers.  Initial study results were released at a 4 January AAS meeting session in Washington DC.

These report that almost 60% of female respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “Sometimes I am afraid others will discover how much knowledge or ability I lack”.  Only 47% of male respondents agreed or strongly agreed.  Figures compiled by the AIP show that female astronomers held only 17% of all US astronomy faculty positions as of 2006, the most recent data available. 

Attrition is hard to determine, but in 1992, according to the AAS, around 23% of US astronomy graduate students were women.  According to the recently released National Science Foundation indicators, 34% of astronomy graduate students were women in 2006.

Study co-lead researcher Patricia Knezek, an associate scientist at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory and deputy director of the WIYN Observatory, both based in Tucson, Arizona, wonders whether the 'impostor syndrome' is forcing women to drop out of astronomy prematurely. First described in 1978 by two clinical psychologists, the impostor syndrome — in which the sufferer believes himself or herself to be inadequate in his or her field despite evidence to the contrary — has been documented across scientific fields in both women and men (see Nature 459, 468 –469; 2009).  Knezek hopes that subsequent data sets will indicate whether the incidence of impostor syndrome correlates with the number of women and men who drop out of astronomy.

The findings also underscore the importance of effective mentoring at all career stages.  “The people who feel that they have knowledgeable and helpful mentors tend to be much happier and much more likely to take chances, maybe to apply for a job that they might not necessarily think they're qualified for,” Knezek says, adding that this information could be used to combat the impostor syndrome and possibly help keep more women in astronomy beyond PhD level.  “This is one of the things that we hope will come out of the data,” she says.  “Then we will feed all of it back into the system and use it to try to improve how we train, promote and retain.”

The longitudinal study also seeks to identify the ultimate occupations of postgraduate astronomers, including those outside of the traditional destinations of academia and national observatories.  The initial survey has 1,143 respondents, and about 800 of these have agreed to participate in the full-length project, which will follow the astronomers for 15 years, from 2008.  The next data collection will begin in 2011 and collections will continue every three years after that.  “We have no long-term data of this type,” says co-lead researcher Rachel Ivie, assistant director of the AIP Statistical Research Center.  “We need to learn who goes where and what kind of job they're going to get.”

Karen Kaplan 

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    UFO Caught Over Ireland — or California

UFO sighting puzzles NL residents

UK's The Sun creates UFO news now?

UFO disclosure: The Tale of Two Earths?      

 Return Of The UFO That Mined Uranium In Argentina During The 1970s?

     

           

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    FEATURE STORY

The Large Hadron Collider Could Prove the Existence of a Parallel Universe

One of the most fascinating discoveries of our new century may be imminent if the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva produces nano- blackholes when it goes live again.  According to the best current physics, such nano blackholes could not be produced with the energy levels the LHC can generate, but could only come into being if a parallel universe were providing extra gravitational input. 

Versions of multiverse theory suggest that there is at least one other universe very close to our own, perhaps only a millimeter away.  This makes it possible that some of the effects, especially gravity, "leak through," which could be responsible for the production of dark energy and dark matter that make up 96% of the universe.

 A huge volume of space that includes the Milky Way and super-clusters of galaxies is flowing towards a mysterious, gigantic unseen mass named mass astronomers have dubbed "The Great Attractor," some 250 million light years from our Solar System. The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are the dominant structures in a galaxy cluster called the Local Group which is, in turn, an outlying member of the Virgo supercluster.  Andromeda–about 2.2 million light-years from the Milky Way–is speeding toward our galaxy at 200,000 miles per hour.

This motion can only be accounted for by gravitational attraction, even though the mass that we can observe is not nearly great enough to exert that kind of pull.  The only thing that could explain the movement of Andromeda is the gravitational pull of a lot of unseen mass–perhaps the equivalent of 10 Milky Way-size galaxies–lying between the two galaxies.

Some scientists are already looking beyond the Large Hadron Collider and onto the next generation of ultimega-atom-smasher.  That's because scientists actually plan things and can concentrate for longer than four seconds, unlike the mass media which reports on them.  One potential particle pulverizing system is a muon collider: the latest concept in the cutting edge that parts particles.

 It might seems spoiled to be calling for another multimillion dollar megacollider when the latest one hasn't even started, but the LHC is no Deep Thought: they aren't going to turn it on and have the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (eventually) tumble out.  Whatever the results of the proton-pounding experiments underneath the Franco-Swiss border there are whole swathes of the high-energy particle spectrum still out of reach – and which we want to look at next will be determined by the LHC.

The muon collider concept combines exciting potential with challenging problems.  Muons are only a ninth of the mass of protons and so can be accelerated to higher energies with current hardware (in fact, because they're made of fewer subatomic bits they can reach higher effective energies even with less powerful equipment). 

They're two hundred times heavier than electrons, but because they're less prone to radiate away energy via synchrotron radiation when being bent around curves by magnetic fields, they can be kept in rings at energy levels where electrons would require vast linear accelerators. The challenges are just as cool: a muon's stable lifetime is only two point two microseconds, and when faced with the problem "they only hang around for a couple millionths of a second" the designers said "let's just accelerate them to close to the speed of light" – that way they hang around long enough (in our frame) due to relativistic time dilation. 

If that sounds improbable, it's already happened to you a bunch of times while reading this sentence: muons created by cosmic ray impacts classically couldn't survive long enough to reach the surface, it's only time dilation extending their life from our reference frame that lets them stream into the surface of the Earth, bubble chambers, and your body right now.

There are still extraordinarily significant challenges to overcome: how do you streams muons into the accelerator from the reactions that cause them, who wants to pay for something this big, and will they be able to overcome other accelerator strategies to get that funding?  Only time, and awesome science, will tell.

Daily Galaxy   

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IN THE SKY THIS MONTH

February 2010

Well, already well into 2010 and the night sky is starting to get really interesting.  So much so you won't even need a telescope to see some of the celestial goodies… your eyes, and maybe a pair of binoculars, will do just fine!

There's a new Moon on February 14 (Valentine's Day) and that's a great time to not only propose, but look for planets as well.  It's also Chinese New Year!  The Moon's glare can sometimes block them out.  Mercury is just starting to make an appearance low above the Eastern horizon during morning twilight.  Look for a small yellowish star-like object.
Mars appears as a bright orange 'star' in the early north-eastern evening sky.  With a reasonably powerful telescope you can see the orange disc, surface markings and possibly the polar caps.

Ever heard of the giant planet?  That's Jupiter, 1300 times bigger than the Earth.  In fact, all the planets in the solar system could fit inside this huge world, still with plenty of room left over to park your car!  You can spot Jupiter setting low in the West and even with a good pair of binoculars it's stunning – the disc is clearly visible with four of its moons spinning around the outside.

The lord of the rings is next.  Saturn is visible earlier in the evening above the Eastern horizon as a pale yellow star.  It's the one planet with the 'Wow' factor but keep in mind the rings are turned mostly side on at the moment, so don't expect a lot OK?

Two welcome signposts for the Australian evening summer sky are the familiar constellations of Orion, (or 'saucepan') and the Southern Cross. Look at the middle star in the handle of Orion with your scope.  It's not a star, it's a beautiful gas cloud called a nebula where stars are being born.  The reddish star below it is one of the few stars in the sky that you can actually recognize its colour.  Betelgeuse is truly a giant, almost 600 times wider than our own Sun.

If you remember holding sparklers as a kid on cracker night you'll love the Alpha-Centaurids.  They're a meteor shower happening best on February 8 with long lasting streaky tails and possibly a rare fireball or two!  What time to watch did you say?  Sorry, it's an early morning treat.  Get up sometime between midnight and dawn and just look eastward.  Nope, you won't need anything, just your eyes will do.    

 Dave Reneke   

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    ASTRO PIC OF THE WEEK 

Mystical Beauty of Star Birth

 

The awesome beauty of the Cocoon Nebula shown here, IC 5146, is the H II region located about 4,000 light years away toward the constellation of Cygnus.  The 'II' in H II indicates that the hydrogen gas that enshrouds these young stars is ionized, which is the result of the hot, young stars that have formed recently, and are starting to burn away the cooler gas that condensed to form them.  Based on recent measurements the massive star in the center is believed to have opened a hole in an existing molecular cloud through which much of the glowing material flows. The star, which formed about 100,000 years ago, provides the energy source for much of the emitted and reflected light from this nebula.

Credit & Copyright: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT), Hawaiian Starlight, CFHT  

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Did You Know?

The Earth was born about 4 and a half billion years ago, at the same time the whole solar system (the Sun, Earth, and other planets) formed.  An enormous cloud of gas started to get smaller and smaller as the gas particles attracted each other with gravity.  Most of the gas went to the center of the solar system and formed the Sun, but several other pieces spinning about the Sun solidified into the planets, including the Earth.    

 

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