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UD astronomers coordinating international observatories in white-dwarf watch
Judi Provencal is star-struck, but not so much by the glitz and glam of Hollywood. You have to look heavenward through a telescope to see the object of her fascination--to pale stars called white dwarfs, their brilliance faded because all of their nuclear fuel has been burned up.
Chemical composition of stars in clusters can tell history of our galaxy
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, an international team of astronomers has shown how to use the chemical composition of stars in clusters to shed light on the formation of our Milky Way. This discovery is a fundamental test for the development of a new chemical tagging technique uncovering the birth and growth of our Galactic cradle.
University of Utah to build telescope in southern Utah
The Willard L. Eccles Foundation donated $600,000 so the University of Utah can build a 32-inch, research-class, optical telescope in southern Utah. The project is part of an effort to establish a full-fledged astronomy program at the university and perhaps to create a high-altitude observatory that will attract other new telescopes to the state.
Full speed ahead for cosmic ray project
Construction is accelerating on a $17 million cosmic ray observatory west of Delta, Utah, thanks to two U.S. agencies: the Bureau of Land Management issued a permit, and the National Science Foundation approved a $2.4 million grant.
South African Large Telescope Makes Its Debut
Exactly five years after groundbreaking, the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) project has released its first colour images, marking the achievement of 'first light' and the successful debut of full operation for SALTICAM, a $600 000 digital camera designed and built for SALT at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO). SALT is the largest optical telescope in the southern hemisphere, and equal to the largest in the world. Gathering more than 25 times as much light as any existing African telescope, SALT can detect objects as faint as a candle flame on the moon.
Scientific heart of giant telescope comes together
In the spring of 2005, when the new Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) trains its huge eye on the southern sky for the first time, the starlight it gathers will be parsed and analyzed by an instrument more befitting a space-based telescope than a ground-based monster.
The instrument, known as the Prime Focus Imaging Spectrograph, will sit 10 stories above the 11-by-10-meter primary mirror of what will be the largest telescope in the Southern Hemisphere. Its station high above the light-gathering mirror, instead of in the bowels of the SALT Observatory, calls for the same compact, lightweight specs of an instrument destined for Hubble or other space-borne telescope.
First stars might have been powered by dark matter
For a long time, scientists have assumed that the very first stars were powered by fusion, in processes similar to what goes on in present day stars. But a new theory is emerging to challenge that view. “The first stars were different in a lot of ways,” Katherine Freese, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan, tells
PhysOrg.com.
Astronomers Discover Supergiant Star Spews Molecules Needed for Life
University of Arizona astronomers who are probing the oxygen-rich environment around a supergiant star with one of the world's most sensitive radio telescopes have discovered a score of molecules that include compounds needed for life.
