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  * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - April 1, 2005 * * *

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

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DARK DAYS FOR DARK ENERGY?

Most astrophysics papers sink into the ponds of academia and hardly make a
ripple. Others spawn tidal waves. The latest cosmological tsunami was
triggered on March 14th, when Edward ("Rocky") Kolb (Fermilab), Sabino
Matarrese (University of Padova, Italy), Alessio Notari (McGill
University, Canada), and Antonio Riotto (National Institute of Nuclear
Physics, Italy) posted a terse, four-page paper on arxiv.org, an online
bulletin board that's rapidly taking the place of established journals.
The paper invokes the 25-year-old inflation theory to explain away dark
energy -- a mysterious force that astronomers have recently embraced to
explain why the universe's expansion is accelerating.

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1488_1.asp

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COMET-CRASHING MISSION's MYOPIC EYE

NASA announced last March 25th that Deep Impact, which is en route for a
July 4th encounter with Comet Tempel 1, is experiencing a technical glitch
that is preventing the flyby spacecraft's primary camera from reaching
perfect focus....

>  http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1491_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

Exoplanet Image Update

The purported planet around GQ Lupi may not be a planet at all. The newly
released paper by Neuhauser and his colleagues suggest that the the object
in question could be as much as 42 Jupiter masses. Brown dwarfs are, by
definition, between 13 and 74 Jupiter masses (S&T: May issue, page 34).

SKY & TELESCOPE will continue to report on this story as more details come
to light.

Exoplanet Imaged?

For centuries, astronomers have dreamed of taking a direct image of a
planet orbiting another star. In April 2004, a team led by Gael Chauvin
(European Southern Observatory) claimed to have imaged a 5-Jupiter-mass
planet orbiting the brown dwarf 2MASS 1207 (a claim that has been
bolstered by subsequent observations). Now, a team led by Ralph Neuhauser
(University of Jena, Germany) says it has imaged an even lower-mass
planet: one with perhaps just twice the mass of Jupiter....

David Bushnell (1913-2005)

David Bushnell, the founder of Bushnell Optical Corporation, died of
cancer on March 24th. He was 91....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1490_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* Last-quarter Moon on Friday, April 1st.
* Daylight saving time, observed in most of North America, begins at 2:00
a.m. on April 3rd. Clocks "spring ahead" one hour.
* A partial eclipse of the Sun occurs on March 8th for the southern United
States, all of Central America, and much of South America. The eclipse is
total over parts of the southern Pacific and annular for parts of Costa
Rica, Panama, Colombia, and Venezuela. In the U.S., the northern limit of
the eclipse runs from southern California to central New Jersey.

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

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SEE PHIL PLAIT AND WIL TIRION AT NEAF (Advertisement)

Don't miss the largest astronomy gathering on the East Coast! Cosponsored
by SKY & TELESCOPE and the Rockland Astronomy Club, the 14th annual
Northeast Astronomy Forum and Telescope Show will be held Saturday, April
16th, through Sunday, April 17th. Mark your calendar for this two-day
event held in Suffern, New York. Shop for binoculars, telescopes,
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