From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Sat Sep 17 2005 - 13:47:56 UTC
----- Original Message -----
From: bulletins_at_SkyandTelescope.com<mailto:bulletins_at_SkyandTelescope.com>
To: ljk4_at_msn.com<mailto:ljk4_at_msn.com>
Sent: Friday, September 16, 2005 8:23 PM
Subject: S&T's Weekly News Bulletin for September 16
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* * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - September 16, 2005 * * *
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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, just paste them into your Web
browser.) Clear skies!
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A GALAXY-FREE GALAXY NUCLEUS?
Discovered four decades ago, quasars are starlike pinpricks of light that
shine across billions of light-years of intergalactic space. Conventional
wisdom states that they are the ultracompact, ultraluminous nuclei of
massive galaxies. The Hubble Space Telescope has amply buttressed that
paradigm, showing that most of these ultraluminous beacons do inhabit
recognizable galaxies. But a new Hubble study of 20 relatively nearby
quasars in the September 15th issue of NATURE has turned up one that
apparently is galaxy-free.
And that poses a puzzle. After all, astronomers have concluded that a
quasar lights up because a supermassive black hole in a galaxy's very core
has gobbled up nearby material, heating some to multimillion-degree
temperatures and blasting the rest into space at near-light speeds. If
HE0450-2958 truly lives in intergalactic space, then astronomers have to
explain where it gets its fuel....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1592_1.asp
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GAMMA-RAY BURST BLASTS DISTANCE RECORD
A recent gamma-ray burst has shattered the GRB distance record with a
redshift of 6.29 -- placing this event only about 900 million years after
the Big Bang, in an era when galaxies and stars were first beginning to
coalesce in the young universe. The previous record burst had a redshift
of 4.5, and only a few other objects have been estimated to be at greater
distances....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1591_1.asp
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HAYABUSA ARRIVES AT ASTEROID ITOKAWA
After a series of setbacks, including the recent loss of a key instrument
on the Suzaku X-ray observatory, Japanese space scientists finally have
something to cheer about. On September 12th at 1:00 Universal Time, at a
point some 320 million kilometers (200 million miles) from Earth, a
spacecraft named Hayabusa reached asteroid 25143 Itokawa and eased into
position just 20 kilometers away from it....
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1590_1.asp
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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY
* Full Harvest Moon on Saturday, September 17th.
* Fire-bright Mars shines far to the lower left of the Moon late on
Tuesday, September 20th.
* Jupiter (magnitude -1.7) can still be spotted in early twilight. Look
very low in the west, far to the lower right of brighter Venus. Jupiter is
getting lower every day.
> http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/ataglance
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> http://SkyandTelescope.com/MSA
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Copyright 2005 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided
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