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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - October 15, 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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A PLANET FOUND THROUGH ASTEROID BELTS

Astronomers are almost ready to say it flat out: Beta Pictoris has a
planet. The planet's orbit is 25 percent larger than Saturn's, and its
gravity has herded smaller objects into belts much the way Jupiter has
shaped our own solar system's asteroid belt. "The Beta Pic system is
likely to be at a violent, planetesimal-collision stage in an early solar
system," writes a Japanese team led by Yoshiko K. Okamoto (Kitasato
University) in the October 7th Nature.

Beta Pictoris is a young, 4th-magnitude white star (spectral type A3) 63
light-years away in the southern constellation Pictor. Its age is
estimated at just 12 to 20 million years. Beta Pic achieved stellar star
status in 1983 when the American-Dutch Infrared Astronomical Satellite
(IRAS) discovered a large, edge-on disk of gas and dust around it.
Subsequent imaging of the disk revealed warps and tilts, as well as a
relatively empty region within 80 astronomical units from the central star
(twice the average distance of Pluto from the Sun)....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1369_1.asp

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KEPLER'S SUPERNOVA IN THE SPOTLIGHT

By combining images from infrared, visual, and X-ray telescopes, a mosaic
of Kepler's Supernova Remnant reveals an expanding shell of metal-enriched
stellar material powered by a shock wave that rocks everything in its
path.

Four-hundred years ago, on October 9, 1604, skywatchers -- including
astronomer Johannes Kepler -- first saw a bright new star shining at
magnitude -2 in the constellation Ophiuchus. It remained bright for weeks.
At the time, no one knew what is was, but now we recognize it as the last
observed supernova within our galaxy.

A team led by Ravi Sankrit and William Blair (Johns Hopkins University)
used multiwavelength data from three NASA space observatories -- the
Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope (visible light), and
the Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared) -- to image the scattered remains
of the explosion....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1368_1.asp

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HIGHLIGHTS OF THIS WEEK'S SKY

* The red star Antares is to the lower-right of the crescent Moon in the
southwest at twilight on the 17th.
* First-quarter Moon on Wednesday, October 20th.
* The Orionid meteor shower peaks during the early morning hours of the
21st.

For more details, see This Week's Sky at a Glance and Planet Round up:

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

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Copyright 2004 Sky Publishing Corp. S&T's Weekly News Bulletin is provided
as a free service to the astronomical community by the editors of SKY &
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news is available on our Web site at http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/.

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