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| The New Forum is Online |
Sep 6, 2005 - As I mentioned a few days ago, Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy and I have decided to merge our two forums into one super-space forum. The new forum is now live, and accessible from http://www.bautforum.com. This new forum has more than 10,000 members, and almost 550,000 posts.
Although the forum is functional and ready for conversations, we'll still be tweaking it over the next few days, weeks, months. Let us know if you find any bugs. Please also let us know if you're having any problems logging in with your username.
I look forward to seeing you there.
Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today (Full Story) |
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| NGC 6822. Image credit: Local Group Galaxies Team/NOAO/AURA/NSF. Click to enlarge. |
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| What's Up This Week - September 5 - September 11, 2005 |
Sep 6, 2005 - Greetings, fellow Sky Watchers! While the Moon will figure prominently in our studies this week, let's start off with telescopic challenge - "Barnard's Galaxy". Do you only have binoculars? Don't worry, the NGC 6871 will surely please you. If you have eyes, then you're in luck as the Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Spica dazzle the western skyline and Piscid meteor comes to call. So, get thee out under the stars and in the moonlight, because...
Here's what's up! (Full Story) |
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| Cassini Scientists Make New Ring Discoveries |
| Sep 6, 2005 - Cassini scientists have announced a host of new findings about Saturn's rings, including some new knotted structures in the planet's F ring. One of the major discoveries is that parts of Saturn's D ring (its innermost ring) have relocated and dimmed. In fact scientists have been able to track fairly significant changes between when Voyager first visited Saturn 25 years ago. The delicate G ring seems to contain faint arcs, which might be hiding additional planets. And most surprisingly, knots in the planet's F ring seem to be arranged like a coiled spring winding around the planet. (Full Story) |
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| Artist's impression of a pulsar 'eating' a companion star. Image credit: ESA Click to enlarge |
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| Star Gobbles Up Its Friend |
| Sep 6, 2005 - The ESA's Integral space observatory and NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer spacecraft have found a rapidly spinning pulsar in the process of consuming a neighbour. This discovery supports the theory that pulsars spin so quickly because they pick up material from a companion, which increases their mass. Pulsars were once stars more than 8 times as large as our Sun, but their intense gravity compacted them down to a size of about 20 km (12 miles) across. (Full Story) |
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| Moon Pandora from outside Saturn's F ring. Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI Click to enlarge |
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| Pandora Shepherding the Rings |
| Sep 5, 2005 - In this photograph taken by Cassini, you can see the faint moon Pandora moving through Saturn's F ring. As a shepherd moon, Pandora and its partner Prometheus confine and shape the main F ring with its gravity. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across. This image was taken on August 2, 2005, when Cassini was approximately 610,000 kilometers (379,000 miles) from Pandora. (Full Story) |
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| Building Life from Star-Stuff |
| Sep 5, 2005 - There's a long chain of events that led from the collapse of our local cloud of gas and dust to the evolution of life here on Earth. Exactly how each of these steps unfolded is still a bit of a mystery, but scientists know that a few atomic combinations were necessary: water, and organic compounds containing carbon. Dying stars are the source for this carbon, which they belch out, creating a kind of carbon soot. From there, this soot is blasted by intense radiation to create more than 100 different molecules, including fatty acids and simple sugars. (Full Story) |
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