========================================================================

 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - October 22, 2004 * * *

========================================================================

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!

========================================================================

EARTH'S TWISTED SPACEWARP

Yet another prediction by Einstein's general theory of relativity seems to
be holding true: a rotating body, such as Earth, should slightly twist the
space in which it is embedded. Two physicists who have been tracking
satellites orbiting Earth claim to have made the first reliable
measurement of this effect. Others remain unconvinced -- but a different
experiment should soon settle the question once and for all.

The effect in question is called "frame dragging," a very slight twisting
of space-time induced by any rotating mass. (Think of a ball bearing
spinning in syrup.) The phenomenon is more formally known as the
Lense-Thirring effect, after the Austrian physicists Joseph Lense and Hans
Thirring, who predicted it in 1918 two years after Einstein published
general relativity....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1374_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
ROCKY PLANETS GALORE?

Astronomers using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope have found dozens
of debris disks stemming from recent collisions of solid bodies orbiting
young -- and not-so-young -- stars. Some of the debris seems to come from
very large individual collisions, such as the one that smashed the early
Earth and created our Moon. Such evidence "reassures us that the
probability is high" that terrestrial planets are abundant in the
universe, Scott Kenyon (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) said
at a press conference Monday.

A dusty debris disk arises after an infant star's original, gassy
protoplanetary disk has dissipated and left solid planetesimals behind to
jostle and bang into one another. The IRAS satellite found the first signs
of debris disks some 20 years ago around a few bright stars such as Vega,
Fomalhaut, and Beta Pictoris. Now George H. Rieke (Steward Observatory)
and 11 colleagues have used Spitzer to examine 266 stars having masses of
2 to 3 Suns and ages ranging from 5 million to 850 million years. They
found dust from collisions forming "an immense variety" of debris disks
around 71 of the stars....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1371_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A NEWFOUND GLOBULAR CLUSTER

An astronomer-in-training has discovered a new globular cluster in Aquila
by trolling through images taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope.

If it weren't hidden behind interstellar dust, the cluster would shine at
4th magnitude -- making it one of the most spectacular deep-sky objects
anywhere. Unfortunately, backyard stargazers won't be spotting GLIMPSE-C01
any time soon, even though it may be one of the closest globular clusters
(roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth) and one of the most luminous
(pouring out the light of some 200,000 Suns). That's because interstellar
matter blocks all but one millionth of the cluster's Earthbound visible
light.

However, the dusty molecular clouds that lie between us and GLIMPSE-C01
are much more transparent to the cluster's mid-infrared light -- the kind
Spitzer senses....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1370_1.asp

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

OCTOBER'S IDEAL LUNAR ECLIPSE

The best astronomical events usually seem to happen at the worst times and
places -- at 3 a.m. low above your most obstructed horizon, or maybe only
in East Antarctica. But not this time, not for observers anywhere in the
Americas. On October 27, 2004, the full Moon will undergo a deep total
eclipse lasting for 1 hour 22 minutes, when it will be high in the eastern
sky after dark but while most people are still awake and about....

Europe and much of Africa also get a good view of this eclipse, but at a
less convenient time: before dawn on the morning of October 28th....

http://SkyandTelescope.com/observing/objects/eclipses/article_1340_1.asp

========================================================================
(Continued to next message)

___
 þ OLXWin 1.00b þ If a cow laughs hard does milk come out its nose?

--- Maximus/2 3.01