News from the AAS Making it into the Media

Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 11:45 AM by Administrator

I am now at a session on visualization in astronomy which is showing some amazing images and movies. I’ll try to post a few of them later. While here, I finished putting together a collection of links to news from the meeting that has made it into the media:

• NASA chief: Money will be tight for astronomy: Let’s get the depressing news out of the way. I didn’t get the impression we were in trouble at the actual talk, so this is a bit depressing.
• Scientists ‘RAVE-ing’ about most ambitious star survey ever: (Original Press Release) RAVE is “an ambitious all-sky spectroscopic survey aimed at measuring the speed, temperature, surface gravity and composition of up to a million stars passing near the sun.” They have gathered data on 80,000 of the 1.2 million stars they hope to eventually obtain spectra for.
• Clemson research collaboration reveals star forming activity: (Original Press Release) Basically, an interesting project to track the amount of an isotope of aluminum in the interstellar medium which has a relatively short half-life and only produced in Supernova in order to determine the rate of Supernova in the galaxy.
• Hubble panoramic view of Orion Nebula reveals thousands of stars: (Original Press Release) An 18000×18000 image of the Orion nebula composed of images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Amazing and beautiful. The Magellanic Cloud Emission Line Survey (MCELS) is a ground-based set of images that is equally amazing.
• Astronomers report mysterious giant star clusters engaging in “Star Formation on Steroids: This was kind of neat, the announcement of observations of “super star clusters” in a dozen nearby galaxies. They claim these star clusters are the predecessors to the familiar globular clusters of the Milky Way.
• Project Hopes to Find Star Dust on Earth: (Original Press Release) This Stardust@Home project doesn’t want to borrow your computer cycles (like SETI@home) but instead they want to seize your brainpower directly!
• Mapping Orion’s winds:: “Bob O’Dell has been mapping the winds blowing in the Orion Nebula, the closest stellar nursery similar to the one in which the Sun was born. [...] a major observational effort [... has ...] given the Vanderbilt astronomer the information he needs to measure the stellar winds with unprecedented detail.
• No stars in the clouds: “A team of astronomers from the University of Pittsburgh and the Universitäts-Sternwarte Muünchen in Munich, Germany, announced today [...] that their search for dwarf galaxies in fast-moving clouds of gas has yielded no results, leading them to suggest alternative avenues of research to find the supposedly “missing” galaxies.”

And now a series of items on black holes, which are popular with the media because “black holes are cool”:

• MIT: Spinning black hole leaves dent in space-time: “MIT scientists and colleagues have found a black hole that has chiseled a remarkably stable indentation in the fabric of space and time, like a dimple in one’s favorite spot on the sofa.” (the original press relase)
• Scientists find black hole’s ‘point of no return’: “[...] strong evidence, the team said, for the existence of a theoretical border around a black hole called an event horizon, a point from beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape.”
• Monster black holes grow after galactic mergers:”An analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deepest view of the universe offers compelling evidence that monster black holes in the centers of galaxies were not born big but grew over time through repeated galactic mergers.”
• NASA’S Chandra finds black holes stirring up galaxies: “The discovery of far-reaching explosive activity, due to giant central black holes in these old galaxies, was a surprise to astronomers.”
• New insights into massive black hole: UCLA astronomy:”UCLA astronomers can determine, for the first time, orbits of massive young stars located a few light months from the enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy - stars that hold an imprint of how they were born. The origin of young stars at the center of our galaxy has puzzled astronomers, but the orbits may be the key to unlocking this mystery.”
• Astronomers shed surprising light on our galaxy’s black hole: “In the most comprehensive study of Sagittarius A*, the enigmatic supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, astronomers led by Northwestern University’s Farhad Yusef-Zadeh [...] have discovered that Sagittarius A* produces rapid flares close to the innermost region of the black hole in many different wavelengths and that these emissions go up and down together.”

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