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  * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - June 3, 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 manually type the URLs
into your Web browser.) Clear skies!

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BROWN-DWARF BINARY MAY CHALLENGE THEORIES

At this week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, Vanderbilt University astronomer Yilen Gomez Maqueo Chew and
five colleagues presented detailed observations of the first known
eclipsing binary system containing two brown dwarfs -- starlike gas balls
not quite massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. Seen
from Earth as a single point of light, the system resides in the Orion
Nebula (M42) and is therefore several million years old -- ancient in
human terms, but extremely young by the standards that apply to
lightweight stars.

Gomez Maqueo Chew's team has monitored the "star" over the past three
years with the 1.3-meter SMARTS telescope at the Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The team nailed down the major
characteristics of both of the system's brown dwarfs by garnering two
complementary kinds of data...

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1525_1.asp

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TELESCOPE ENTHUSIASTS CONVERGE IN CALIFORNIA

Clear, dark skies and beautiful spring weather greeted the more than 1,600
stargazers who attended the annual RTMC Astronomy Expo (formerly the
Riverside Telescope Makers Conference) near Big Bear City, California,
last weekend. Hundreds of telescopes were on display and in use, with
stunning views of the solar system and the universe always within arm's
reach -- or within a few steps up a ladder to the eyepiece of a giant
Dobsonian reflector...

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1524_1.asp

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GALEX PROVIDES ULTRAVIOLET GOODIES

The Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite inadvertently picked up an
assortment of astronomical goodies in our solar neighborhood while
surveying distant galaxies in ultraviolet light. The satellite's large
field of view, 1.5 degrees, catches many nearby objects that unexpectedly
flare and glow in this high-energy part of the spectrum. Barry Welsh
(University of California, Berkeley) described some of the interesting
phenomena that turned up in GALEX's "contaminated" observations, including
an exciting flare in a red-dwarf star whose brightness increased more than
10,000 times.

The unique capabilities of the GALEX cameras allow astronomers to make
stellar observations on a much faster timescale than normal. Its photon
counting camera can take a picture about once every 0.05 second...

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1523_1.asp

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NEWS FROM DAY 1 OF THE AAS MEETING

The first day of the American Astronomical Society's meeting in
Minneapolis, Minnesota, yielded a flurry of exciting new science results.
But a dark cloud of anxiety looms over the conference as astronomical
research in the United States faces an uncertain future in a tightening
fiscal environment.

A team led by Nathan Smith (University of Colorado) presented one of the
major science results: a new Spitzer Space Telescope infrared image of the
Carina Nebula. This nebula, which is visible to the naked eye in the
Southern Hemisphere, harbors dozens of unstable, extremely massive stars.
These stars blow winds at up to 1,600 kilometers per second (4 million
miles per hour) -- with disastrous consequences for their surroundings....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1520_1.asp

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STRONGEST SOURCE OF GRAVITATIONAL WAVES?

Astronomers have new evidence that a 21st-magnitude speck in Cancer may be
the strongest source in our sky of gravitational waves -- weak, elusive
ripples in the fabric of space-time that should be washing through the
solar system, as predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity. If
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