Universe Today - October 15, 2001

An international team of astronomers have discovered eight planets orbiting around distant stars; three are the same size as our own Jupiter. The planets were discovered using the Keck telescope in Hawaii, the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) in New South Wales and the Lick telescope in California. With these findings added to the total planets discovered, hunters are finding that 7% of all stars have Jupiter-sized planets within the orbital distance of the Earth.

Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Tyurin and Vladimir Dezhurov went for a walk outside the International Space Station on Monday to install science experiments and an advertisement for Kodak. One experiment will evaluate contamination from jet exhaust, and the other will test a range of materials to see how they stand up to the harsh environment of space. The spacewalk lasted 6 hours.

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft performed a final course correction on Friday to put it onto the right path to enter Mars orbit later this month. The spacecraft fired its thrusters for 3 minutes to change its speed and direction enough to hit Mars' atmosphere at exactly the right angle and aerobrake into orbit. Odyssey will reach Mars on October 24th.

Over one year ago, a team of astronomers announced that the black hole at the heart of the Andromeda galaxy was cooler than it should be. More recent data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory revealed the area with 10x the resolution, demonstrated that the black hole is the correct temperature, but there is a very cool X-ray source only one arcsecond away which gave the false readings.