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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - January 14, 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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HOORAY FOR HUYGENS

Move over, Mars! Saturn's large moon Titan is now the most distant world
touched by the hand of human technology. On Friday January 14th the
European Space Agency, in partnership with NASA, delivered the Huygens
probe safely to the surface of Titan after a long descent by parachute
through the moon's dense, haze-shrouded atmosphere. Touchdown occurred
about 13:34 Central European Time (7:34 a.m. EST)....

The probe's Descent Imager and Spectral Radiometer (DSIR) recorded about
350 images in all, and within hours mission scientists were left
open-mouthed by their first close-up looks at Titan's amazing
landscape....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1442_1.asp

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ORION TELESCOPES SOLD TO IMAGINOVA

In a move that caught the astronomical community by surprise, on January
13th Imaginova Corp. announced its purchase of Orion Telescopes &
Binoculars. Based in Watsonville, California, Orion is a major
manufacturer and distributor of telescopes and other accessories for the
amateur-astronomy market. Negotiations between the two companies began
about six months ago; financial terms of the transaction were not
disclosed.

"The acquisition of Orion Telescopes & Binoculars brings one of the most
prestigious brands in astronomy into the Imaginova family of media and
consumer products," said Daniel Stone, Imaginova's president and chief
executive officer, in a press release....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1440_1.asp

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SPITZER REVEALS GREEDY STELLAR BABIES IN TRIFID

Stars in the process of forming compete with one another for resources as
they grow. That's just one of the results that has emerged from new
Spitzer Space Telescope infrared images that penetrate dust in the Trifid
Nebula (M20), which lies 5,400 light-years away in the constellation
Sagittarius.

Spitzer uncovered 120 young stars and 30 even younger protostars behind
the dust. Ten of the protostars reside in four dense knots of dust, where
astronomers had previously thought conditions weren't right for star
formation. "Finally, with Spitzer infrared images, we can see what's going
on in here," says team leader Jeonghee Rho (Caltech)....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1439_1.asp

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DISK DEMOLITION DERBY

Two teams of astronomers have reported signs of recent collisions between
planetesimals orbiting Sunlike stars in circumstellar disks.

One team, led by Kate Y. L. Su (University of Arizona), used the Spitzer
Space Telescope to image the disk around Vega in the mid-infrared with
unprecedented sensitivity. Su and her colleagues found signs that much of
the disk material is in the form of dust grains just a few microns across.
Stellar radiation pressure should blow such small grains out of the system
in short order, so Su's team suspects they come from recent collisions....

A second team, led by Charles M. Telesco (University of Florida), has
found evidence for a collision of 100-km objects around Beta Pictoris just
100 years ago or so -- adding new detail to a finding by Yoshiko K.
Okamoto announced last October....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1438_1.asp

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GALAXY MAPS REVEAL NATURE OF UNIVERSE

Maps provide windows into the past. For instance, towns and villages are
distributed differently in Europe than they are in North America, because
the two continents experienced very different settlement histories.
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