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| Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forums Will Merge |
Sep 1, 2005 - I just wanted to let you know that Phil Plait (from Bad Astronomy) and I have decided to merge our two discussion forums together into one super forum. With a combined 11,000ish members this will create one of the largest space and astronomy-related communities on the Internet. Phil and I felt that our two communities were very similar, and there's a lot of overlap between members, topics, discussions, etc, that this merger just made sense. We'll both be very active in this new forum, and be sharing administrative responsibilities.
I'm going to be taking the Universe Today forum offline on the evening of Saturday, September 3rd, and then we'll be merging the forums together. Hopefully within 24-48 hours we'll have the new forum live and running. If everything goes well all the posts from both forums will be nicely shuffled into the new structure. You should be able to just log into the new forum as you did before. I'll provide more details about how to actually reach it once it's live.
Our two news sites will remain separate, so we're just merging the forums.
You can read more details about the merge over on the Bad Astronomy forum.
Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions or concerns.
Thanks!
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today (Full Story) |
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| Pulsar path over about 2.5 million years. Image credit: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF Click to enlarge |
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| Escaping Pulsar Breaks Speed Records |
| Sep 1, 2005 - Astronomers have found a fast moving pulsar on a trajectory that'll take it completely out of the Milky Way. The object, called B1508+55, is located about 7,700 light-years from Earth. The incredibly sharp radio vision of the continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) has tracked this pulsar moving at approximately 1,100 km/s (670 miles/s). By tracking its position back, the astronomers have calculated that it started out in the constellation Cygnus. A powerful nearby supernova explosion probably kicked it into its current trajectory. (Full Story) |
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| Bright Young Stars in Trumpler 14 |
| Sep 1, 2005 - This newest image released by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows the star cluster Trumpler 14. This cluster is located about 9,000 light years away from Earth and contains about 1,600 stars. It has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the Milky Way. The bright stars in the cluster are very young - less than 1 million years old - and will explode within a few million more years as powerful supernovae. (Full Story) |
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| An artist's illustration of a circumstellar disk around a massive star. Image credit: NAOJ Click to enlarge |
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| Massive Stars Have Protoplanetary Disks Too |
| Sep 1, 2005 - Astronomers working with the Subaru telescope have found a massive proto-star with a protoplanetary disk surrounding it. The star contains approximately 7 times the mass of the Sun, and astronomers weren't sure if such large stars would gather protoplanetary disks in the same way that less massive stars form them, such as our Sun. One theory, that massive stars are formed by collisions and mergers with smaller stars has lost ground because of this discovery. (Full Story) |
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| Hubble Working on Only Two Gyros Now |
| Sep 1, 2005 - Managers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have intentionally turned off one of its working three gyroscopes to try and lengthen the lifespan of the aging instrument. These gyros allow Hubble to turn and point at new locations in the sky. Engineers have figured out several techniques that will allow Hubble to perform the same science, but with just two gyros. Hopefully this will give Hubble an additional 8-months of operation, extending its availability into 2008. (Full Story) |
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| Probing the Formation of Galaxy Clusters |
| Sep 1, 2005 - The ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope is allowing astronomers to study the formation history of entire galaxy clusters. By studying these largest structures in the Universe, astronomers will better understand how galaxies interacted with each other in the past and in the future. (Full Story) |
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