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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - August 13, 2004 * * *

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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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SETI TODAY: "NO NEWS" ISN'T BAD NEWS

Jodie Foster made it look so easy in the 1997 movie CONTACT. And a lot of
people who hope for contact with alien life are getting impatient by now.
With giant radio telescopes having scrutinized some 800 of the nearest
stars for artificial signals, and with a half million home computers
churning through radio data from all across the sky, you might think that
the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, would be well along
by this point.

Wrong. At an August 6th symposium organized by The Planetary Society,
leading SETI experts stressed that we've barely scratched the surface.
Guillermo Lemarchand (University of Buenos Aires) put a number on our
ignorance about alien signals. A couple decades of radio searches, he
explained, have probed only a hundred-trillionth (0.00000000000001) of the
"cosmic haystack" of all the radio channels, sky directions, and other
parameters that need to be searched for the "needle" of an artificial
signal....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1322_1.asp

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NEW CLASS OF LOW-LUMINOSITY GRBS

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are becoming well-known for their frequent shots
of high-energy in the deepest corners of space, many billions of
light-years away. But now astronomers are beginning to think that these
mega-explosions are going off all around us -- we just can't see most of
them.

On December 3, 2003 the European Space Agency's Integral satellite
detected a long-duration GRB in Puppis. Follow-up observations with space-
and ground-based telescopes revealed a fading afterglow in a galaxy only
1.6 billion light-years away. This burst, named GRB 031203 for the date it
was observed, was nearly 1,000 times less-energetic than typical GRBs and,
more interestingly, it's not the only one that has been seen so close to
our galaxy....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1319_1.asp

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HUBBLE SPECTROGRAPH FAILS

One of the Hubble Space Telescope's premier science instruments failed on
August 3rd. A power converter blew in the main electronics box for the
Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS), the only instrument on Hubble
that can record spectra in visible and ultraviolet light, leaving the
instrument permanently unusable and the telescope without a crucial
capability.

This is a huge blow to astronomers, since spectra are needed to study the
chemical composition and physical state of the objects Hubble studies, as
well as measuring redshifts of galaxies and gas velocities around black
holes -- all science goals that the remaining instruments cannot help
with....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1320_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* New Moon on Sunday, August 7th.
* The 6.5-magnitude asteroid Vesta comes within a few arcminutes of the
5th-magnitude star 3 Ceti on Monday, August 16th.
* Venus is at greatest elongation, 46 degrees west of the Sun in the
morning sky on Tuesday, August 17th.

For details, see This Week's Sky at a Glance and Planet Roundup:

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

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