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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

My guest today is Simon Singh, author of many science-related books including Fermat's Enigma, and The Code Book. His latest book, Big Bang, investigates the origins of the search for our place in an ever expanding Universe. Simon speaks to me from his home in London, England. I just want to apologize in advance for the murky audio quality - that's what you get when you call London from Canada through Skype. I've got an audio transcript that you can refer to if you're have trouble making out what Simon said.

In this extreme contrast view of Saturn's rings, has been created by NASA in order to search for spokes. These are ghostly lanes of dust that NASA's Voyager spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope have seen in the past - so far, though, Cassini has failed to get a picture of them. The spokes are probably invisible because the Sun's angle to the rings is relatively high. As Saturn's summer in the southern hemisphere moves into autumn, the spokes should become visible again.

After examining more than 4,000 galaxies in a recent survey, astronomers have discovered that most large galaxies are filled with old stars, It was expected that these large galaxies would be regularly ingesting smaller galaxies, creating bursts of star formation. Instead, however, it's the smaller, fainter galaxies which seem to have all the hot star formation. The large, red galaxies contain the bulk of the mass in the nearby Universe, but very little is understood about their formation or evolution.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered that the long cracks discovered on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus are actually quite young, between 10 and 1,000 years old. These findings support a previous discovery that Enceladus has a very active geology, and its surface features have been changing quite recently. These cracks act like vents, allowing ice and vapour to spew out. The fact that Enceladus is so active came as a surprise to scientists, as it's hard for an object this small to hold onto its heat.

What is the nature of the mysterious dark energy which is accelerating expansion of the Universe? In a recent study published in the Physical Review Letters, physicists are proposing two scenarios: thawing and freezing. In thawing, the expansion of the Universe should eventually come to a stop, and maybe even reverse. In "freezing", the acceleration should continue indefinitely. A new mission: the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) has been proposed by NASA and the US Department of Energy, and should be able to determine which of these two scenarios is correct.

Here's a picture of Saturn's moon Enceladus side by side with the United Kingdom, to show its actual size. Enceladus is only 505 km (314 miles) across, and it could comfortably fit within the states of Arizona or Colorado.

Dust from asteroids entering our atmosphere could affect the weather more than scientists previously believed, according to a new study published this week in the journal Nature. An international team of researchers have studied the dust trail of an asteroid that burned up as it descended through the atmosphere above Antarctica. The 1,000 tonne asteroid formed a cloud of micron-sized particles large enough to influence the local weather in Antarctica.

The ozone hole above the South Pole has returned, and it's on track to be one of the biggest on record. At this time, the hole is the size of Europe, but it will probably continue growing during September - bigger holes appeared in 1996 and 2000. The size of the ozone hole and the time of its appearance depends on the weather conditions in the southern hemisphere.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! This is going to be an exciting week as we start off watching two planets get farther apart and two planets getting closer. Deep sky studies aren't always the property of telescopes, and I encourage you to turn binoculars toward the "Swan Nebula". The next seven days mean dark skies and New Moon, so hitch your wagon to a star as we fly with the "Eagle", take part in a meteor shower, learn we are not "Dumbbells", reach for the "Ring", and quest for the holy "Veil". If all this leaves you "Blinking", then best get your binoculars and telescopes ready, because...

Here's what's up!

Dream up an hypothesis and envelop it with supporting evidence and you're well on the way to contributing to the scientific process. Given that nature surrounds us with a veritable nirvana of wonders, this reasoning process serves us well. A case in point - many years ago, bright flashes in the sky, followed by powerful explosions, teased our imaginations and brain power then and today. Surendra Verma in his book The Tunguska Fireball plays part detective, part historian and part scientist in presenting some highly speculative yet nevertheless plausible reasons for this natural wonder. Scientific processes by their nature are based on fact, but read this and you can judge for yourself how close imagination is its parody.

If you look closely, you can just see Saturn's moon Pan, making its way in between a gap in the planet's majestic rings. Pan is only 26 km (16 miles) across, and it lives inside the Encke Gap. It's also possible to see the subtle F ring in the upper right-hand corner of the photo. Cassini took this image on August 13, 2005 when it was approximately 2.3 million km (1.5 million miles) above Saturn.

Once again, the sky is getting ready to put on a beautiful show - one that doesn't require particularly dark skies, a telescope, or lots of time to enjoy. Three of the brightest objects in the sky: Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon will gather close together over the next two weeks. Jupiter and Venus will reach their closest point on September 1, but on September 6, all three will be relatively clustered together. All you have to do to enjoy this spectacle is look to the West after sunset.