Astronomy magazine will present its 2011 Out-of-this-world Award to a club or organization that has shown excellence in astronomy outreach activities. The annual $2,500 award focuses on ongoing programs — not one specific event — by a nonprofit educational or civic organization.

The award will recognize a group’s sustained efforts to involve its local community in the science and hobby of astronomy. The prize money is to be used for future astronomy outreach activities. Astronomy’s editors will review each entry and select a winner.

The 2010 award went to California’s Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit, which distinguished itself with its prolific outreach, including the “You Can See Too” program dedicated to providing those in wheelchairs access to the stars.

The 2009 award went to the Amateur Observers’ Society of New York, which separated itself with the wide breadth of its “Reach for the Universe” programs. These provide fun and educational astronomical activities for anyone to enjoy.

Astronomy promotes the science and hobby of astronomy through high-quality publications that engage, inform, entertain, and inspire. The magazine also strives to empower local astronomy organizations that help bring celestial wonders to their communities.

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Aries: You will be an inspiration to people whom you meet today. Your vibrant energy and the love and beauty around you motivates them. Showing tenderness and affection does not make you into a weakling. Even men are now exploring their softer, sensitive side. Be gentle and kind to yourself and others.

You will meet a qualified doctor or someone equally knowledgeable who will help you out of your illusory world. It has been taking you away from the real world. It's always advisable to live life on your terms. Then you would never have to blame anybody for the way things turn out in your life. Try to be tactful with people who try and interfere in your life and suggest what you should do.

Taurus: You will be in a positive energy frame today. It makes you optimistic and gives you the faith in your resources and their support. You will also have the confidence to express yourself clearly. Although you are a person who likes the company of others, today you might be in your own dream world. You might even seek solitude and be happy to be by yourself. You would be very lucky in love today. You will be at your cheerful and charming best. Your disarming ways would take away any protests that might be made in response to your romantic proposal. You are responsible for your own personal growth. Nobody else would be as interested or inclined to improve your life. So take charge and go ahead and do what it takes.

Gemini: Keep your expectations low from your dream project. It will take time to bear fruits. Meanwhile, do not give up and instead work harder and hope for the best. Your appreciation of the finer aspects of life, like beauty and harmony would reveal your softer side. You will be lacking in confidence today. But if you need to secure your future then you need to go ahead and do what your conscience thinks is right. Things will change for the better very soon. You have been suffering from hallucinations and nightmares. Today you might receive proper guidance from a qualified person who will help you rid of these.

Cancer: Your actions today will give the impression to those dealing with you today that you are non-committed and restless. Women may resort to boasting or sulking to deal with the sense of insecurity they have. This habit of theirs will project a very non-feminine image of them.

Leo: The sole responsibility of a father is not just to provide for their family. It's imperative that they also spend some time with their kids or else they may grow up emotionally detached with them. You will come across as determined, self-sufficient and intelligent. It also gives you with the much needed physical stamina as well to take some strong decisions for your future.

Virgo: Keep your thoughts and opinions to yourself. Attain some clarity before you try and present it to others. You may be appreciated for your ideas but it might come a little late in the day. Not a very promising day for lovers. Something may bring up a past unresolved dispute. Things may go spiraling down if not handled sensitively.

Libra: Your tenacity and intelligence will make today a very successful one. You will achieve all that you set out to do today. Try not to get affected by small issues. It will only drain you emotionally and mentally. Spend some time to refresh you mind and body.

Scorpio: Although you are a person who likes the company of others, today you might be in your own dream world. You might even seek solitude and be happy to be by yourself. You are advised not to do anything different today. For your good intentions might also be misunderstood by your lover. You would be in a negative mood today. Which leads to unnecessary squabbles with your partner on small issues. Try and remain calm, do not lose your temper or else these small squabbles may grow into a big row.

Sagitarius: You may feel drained of all your energy as you it gets wasted on an unsuccessful project you've taken up. Stop wasting your time and energy and take up something that would refresh you. Fathers need to spend more time with their family and kids. They are missing the love and care that only a father can provide them. Your mental strength is your biggest plus point. It will today help you achieve a higher state of mind that you've been seeking. It wouldn't do you any good to keep thinking about what has already happened, however bad. It will only keep on bothering you. Let go of it. There's more important issues to deal with.

Capricon: It would be very difficult today to balance your time between family and career. There would be a conflict of commitment. Try and explain your situation to your close family members as they will only understand you. You have a forceful personality that can easily overpower any enemy that you might have. But try and restrain showing it in public today. There might be some unforeseen family matters that might require your immediate attention today. This might keep you away from your job or business.

Aquarius: You will act confidently today as your inner Self guides you through the day's events. You will be in a high energy state. You will come across as determined, self-sufficient and intelligent. It also gives you with the much needed physical stamina as well to take some strong decisions for your future. You have been planning to take a vacation to spend some time with yourself for some time now. But unfortunately you may have to postpone your plans due to some unexpected reasons.

Pisces: Women who exhibit great energy and are vibrant and work vigorously will be resented for these very qualities. There might be people who comment that they are not being feminine. Women shouldn't take such negative comments seriously and should go ahead. Friends would encourage you big time to reach your goal. Share your plans with them and they will do all that they can help. It's time now for you to start focusing on yourself and your future. Stop wasting your time thinking and running around for others. You will be full of ideas to expand the current project you have been working on. But some unexpected problems might crop up preventing you from implementing these ideas. You will soon find yourself in a new surrounding. It might be a transfer or a shift to a new place. But this move will definitely bring about a positive change in your nature.

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The Hubble Space Telescope, despite being in the last phase of its tenure in orbit, continues to offer new glimpses into the universe. Now the venerable telescope has peered deep into space and 10 billion years into the past and delivered new images of 18 dwarf galaxies that are, to the excitement of scientists, creating stars at an extremely rapid rate.

"The galaxies are churning out stars at such a rate that the number of stars in them would double in just 10 million years," said a statement released Thursday by the European Space Agency.

"Good grief. That's incredible if that's correct," responded Omar Almaini, astronomer at the University of Nottinghamin the UK. "To form stars so rapidly you must have an enormous amount of gas condensing in the cores of these galaxies." By comparison, our galaxy, the much older and larger Milky Way, has taken a thousand times longer to double its star count.

Holding CANDELS to the sky

The observations were part of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS), an ambitious three-year project that studies the most distant galaxies in the universe. CANDELS is using Hubble to image a much larger region of space than was observed before, and is going extremely deep into the infrared end of the light spectrum to pick up the faintest specks of light.

The new discovery came when CANDELS found a population of small "dwarf" galaxies that were unusually bright in one particular wavelength. As the ESA puts it, "They have turned up in the Hubble images because the radiation from young, hot stars has caused the oxygen in the gas surrounding them to light up like a fluorescent sign."Galaxies with rapidly forming stars characteristically feature huge quantities of oxygen, an element astronomers were not expecting to find.

"Many current models suggest these dwarf galaxies form stars more slowly, over billions of years, to gradually build up to what we see today," Almaini told Deutsche Welle. "The implications of these observations is that actually no, the galaxies form the bulk of their stars extremely rapidly in a burst of star formation. This turns our picture on its head a little bit."

The starburst phase

Astronomers are able to make detailed analyses of dwarf galaxies because there are other, much closer, examples orbiting the Milky Way, which can be used for comparison.

Arjen van der Wel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, was part of the team that made the discovery. "It's interesting to see these galaxies doing what they're doing 10 billion years ago, because they're definitely not doing that today," he said, speaking with Deutsche Welle.

On top of that, there was the significant fact that so many dwarf galaxies were discovered apparently behaving the same way at the same time. "This population is so large that this must be a very common process," said van der Wel. "So all of a sudden we find out that these strong bursts of star-births are probably an important phase in the development of dwarf galaxies."

Hot young stars

It's not yet clear exactly how old these dwarf galaxies are, though they must be significantly younger than the Milky Way. Similarly, astronomers cannot be sure how many generations of stars have appeared previously in those galaxies, since the new wave of star births is outshining any older siblings they have.

"There could be a similar number of older stars that we just cannot see," said van der Wel. "All we see are the new stars. There must be a previous generation of stars, because there is oxygen in these galaxies that must have been produced by them."

The big mystery is why this population of young galaxies was creating stars at such a high rate. Alas, the Hubble may not be around to unravel that one. The aging telescope has now been in orbit around the Earth since 1990, and received one last upgrade - which included the Wide Field Camera 3 used by CANDELS - in 2009.

"We're hoping that Hubble will last until 2013 or 2014," said van der Wel. After that, there will be a gap when astronomers will have to do without a space telescope until the long-delayed launch of the James Webb Space Telescope - co-funded by NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency - at the end of the decade. Astronomers are hoping that JWST will help them see even further back in time, to pristine galaxies going through their very first wave of star births.

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Two clumps of gas that formed in the opening moments of the Universe's existence have been found by astronomers using telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory, the first time that gases never involved in star formation have been detected.

Only the very lightest elements such as hydrogen and helium were formed in the big bang; heavier elements were synthesized a few hundred million years later in the hot furnaces of the first stars and subsequent stellar generations. Although the newly discovered gas clouds were found two billion years after the big bang, they represent the simplest material that existed just seconds after the Universe was born.

“It’s quite exciting, because it’s the first evidence that fully matches the composition of the primordial gas predicted by the big bang theory,” says Michele Fumagalli of the University of California, Santa Cruz, lead author of a paper on the findings published online in Science today.

The team used the HIRES spectrometer on the 10-metre Keck I telescope to analyse light from a distant quasar that was absorbed by the intervening gas clouds. By looking at the way in which the light was absorbed, the astronomers could determine the composition of the constituent elements in the gas cloud, finding nothing other than hydrogen and its heavier isotope, deuterium.

"It was an exciting surprise to see gas with such a lack of heavy elements two billion years after the big bang," Fumagalli tells Astronomy Now. "Prior to this discovery, the lowest measurements of metal abundance in the Universe were about one-thousandth the metallicity of the Sun [metallicity describes how enriched stellar objects are in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium]. Based on this empirical evidence, people started to believe in a 'floor' to the metallicity of cosmic structures, essentially that nothing could be less than one-thousandth the solar metallicity."

Yet the newly discovered gas cloud has just one ten-thousandth of the Sun's metallicity. The finding may point astronomers to the sites of so-called cold flows, streams of as yet never detected cold gas that played a crucial role in building galaxies.

"We know that galaxies need a continuous replenishment of fresh fuel for the formation of stars," explains Fumagalli. "Modern theories and simulations say that this accretion occurs along filaments of cold gas that is not highly enriched with heavy elements, but no direct observations exist to confirm these models. The two gas clouds we have found are composed by cold and pristine gas, similarly to what predicted for these cold flows. This is tantalizing, but at the moment, we do not know if the gas clouds lie in empty regions or in proximity of galaxies. We need to take images and other spectra of that part of the sky to answer this question."

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Accusations that a giant of astronomy, Edwin Hubble, quashed a Belgian cleric who beat him to making one of the greatest discoveries of modern times are unfounded, Nature said on Wednesday. Hubble's reputation has been recently tarnished by suggestions that he, or an ally, ensured that Georges Lemaitre, a little-known Catholic priest and mathematician in Brussels, failed to get credit for discovering that the Universe is expanding.

This discovery is key to the theory that the Universe was born in the "Big Bang" some 14 billion years ago.
And it underpins the stark hypothesis -- rewarded with the Nobel Prize for Physics this year -- that endless expansion will eventually rip all matter apart, leaving the cosmos a frigid place of disconnected atoms.
It was in 1927 that Lemaitre published, in French, his paper in an obscure Belgian journal, the Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels.

Two years later, Hubble in the United States published his own paper. He put forward calculations that later became enshrined as "Hubble's law" and "Hubble's constant," relating to the speed at which a galaxy appears to recede from our view. In 1931, the English translation of Lemaitre's 1927 paper was published in the world's top astronomical journal of the time, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

But, oddly, it did not include key paragraphs from the original text in which Lemaitre had described the same things as Hubble. As a result, dark suggestions have been voiced in books and astronomical publications this year that this was a case of censorship. The deletions, according to these conspiracy theories, were intended to undermine any claim by Lemaitre to have been the first with the great insight.

Intrigued by the mystery, Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, delved deep into archives in London and Brussels. Reporting in Nature, Livio found that the editor of the astronomical journal had sought out Lemaitre, inviting him to set down his findings for the record. Lemaitre, at the journal's request, did the translation of his original text. But the correspondence also shows Lemaitre deliberately left out several paragraphs and footnotes, saying he believed this data had been superseded by new research, said Livio.

"This clearly ends speculation about who translated the paper and who deleted the paragraphs -- Georges Lemaitre did both himself," Livio said. "Lemaitre was not at all obsessed with establishing priority for this original discovery. Given that Hubble's results had been published in 1929, Lemaitre saw no point in repeating his own more tentative earlier findings in 1931."

Hubble -- after whom the US Hubble Space Telescope is named -- died in 1953, leaving behind a reputation for languid brilliance. His early passion was for sport, including amateur boxing; he trained initially as a lawyer but got bored and switched to astronomy; and he adopted British mannerisms and fashions that irritated many of his peers.

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Astronomers have found two small galaxies that appear to circle our Milky Way's galactic neighbor Andromeda, and could shed new light on the mystery of dark matter in the universe, scientists say.

The newfound dwarf galaxies, called Andromeda 28 and 29, are two of the most distant satellites galaxies from Andromeda ever detected. They are located about 600,000 light-years away from Andromeda, and approximately 1.1 million light-years from Earth, researchers said.
 
The Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light-years away and is the nearest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. Like our galaxy, Andromeda is surrounded by numerous dwarf satellite galaxies.  These newly found dwarf galaxies were discovered using a star-counting technique on the newest data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has mapped more than a third of the night sky.
 
The research team, led by astronomer Eric Bell of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich., also analyzed follow-up observations from the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii.  The Andromeda galaxy is the closest spiral galaxy to Earth beyond our own Milky Way, the researchers said. At 600,000 light-years away from their host galaxy, Andromeda 28 and 29 are also 100,000 times fainter and invisible to the naked eye.
 
Even with large telescopes these dwarf galaxies can barely be seen, the researchers said.  The discovery could help astronomers better understand dark matter, which is thought to make up majority of the universe's mass. While dark matter has yet to be directly detected, it is inferred because of the gravitational effects it has on visible matter. The invisible substance is thought to be responsible for organizing visible matter into galaxies, the researchers said. [Infographic Gallery: The History and Structure of the Universe]
 
"These faint, dwarf, relatively nearby galaxies are a real battleground in trying to understand how dark matter acts at small scales," Bell said in a statement. "The stakes are high."The prevailing hypothesis is that visible galaxies are all nestled in beds of dark matter and each bed contains a galaxy, the researchers said. For a given volume of the universe, the predictions match observations of large galaxies, but there are still some unknowns.
 
"[It] seems to break down when we get to smaller galaxies," said Colin Slater, an astronomy Ph.D. student who worked with Bell on the new study. "The models predict far more dark matter halos than we observe galaxies. We don't know if it's because we're not seeing all of the galaxies or because our predictions are wrong."
 
The results of the study could help astronomers narrow down the search for dark matter.  "The exciting answer would be that there just aren't that many dark matter halos," Bell said. "This is part of the grand effort to test that paradigm."The new study will be detailed in the Nov. 20 edition of the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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Astronomers have found the brightest and youngest example yet of a fast-spinning star, suggesting that the extremely luminous versions of these super-dense objects may be far more common than thought.
The spinning star, a millisecond pulsar called J1823-3021A, is located inside a packed conglomeration of stars called a globular cluster about 27,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagitarrius.
The pulsar emits incredibly intense high-energy gamma rays, which the researchers detected and studied using NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. Their analysis suggests the pulsar is just 25 million years old — a baby as far as these stars go, for millisecond pulsars tend to be a billion years old or so, researchers said.

The pulsar's extreme brightness and youth challenge current ideas about how super-bright millisecond pulsars form and how widespread they may be, researchers said. "These anomalously energetic millisecond pulsars must be forming at a rate similar to the previously known, more normal millisecond pulsars — at least in globular clusters, but possibly in the whole universe as well," said study lead author Paulo Freire of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. "In a sense, this pulsar would be the proverbial tip of a hidden new iceberg."

Exotic, fast-spinning stars
Pulsars form when massive stars die in supernova explosions and their remnants collapse into compact objects made only of the particles called neutrons. When a mass as great as our sun's is packed into a space the size of a city, the conserved angular momentum causes the resulting neutron star to spin very rapidly and to emit a ray of high-energy light that sweeps around like a lighthouse beam.

Those pulsars had gone unnoticed because they do not shine brightly despite their high energy level, according to scientists with the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, who announced the find today (Nov. 3). The discovery will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
"We used a new kind of hierarchical algorithm which we had originally developed for the search for gravitational waves," said study co-author Bruce Allen, director of the  Albert Einstein Institute in Hanover, Germany, in a statement. "It's like digging for diamonds or gold: It’s very exciting when you find something."

Looking in gamma-ray light
For the J1823-3021A study, researchers trained the Fermi space telescope on the globular cluster NGC 6624. Globular clusters are good places to look for millisecond pulsars, because the dense packing of stars facilitates the formation of binary systems.

Freire and his colleagues picked up a lot of gamma-ray emission from the cluster — so much that they initially thought the light was coming from 100 or so millisecond pulsars. But that wasn't the case.
"We now find that all detectable gamma-ray emission comes from one single millisecond pulsar," Freire told Space.com in an email.

That pulsar is J1823-3021A, which is spinning at about 11,100 revolutions per minute, or one complete turn every 5.44 milliseconds. The team didn't discover the pulsar; it has been known since the 1990s. But its incredible gamma-ray brightness remained undetected until now. J1823-3021A also appears to have a much stronger magnetic field than other millisecond pulsars. The exotic object's combination of characteristics is likely to have astronomers scratching their heads, Freire said.

"It challenges the way we believe millisecond pulsars form," he said. "It was not thought that, for the spin period of this object (5.44 ms), they could be so energetic and have such a high magnetic field."

The researchers aren't yet sure whether millisecond pulsar formation theories will need a tweak or a serious overhaul. "We are currently investigating a number of possibilities," study co-author Michael Kramer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement. "Nature might even be forming millisecond pulsars in a way we have not anticipated."

Read the rest of this entry »

Astronomers have found the brightest and youngest example yet of a fast-spinning star, suggesting that the extremely luminous versions of these super-dense objects may be far more common than thought.
The spinning star, a millisecond pulsar called J1823-3021A, is located inside a packed conglomeration of stars called a globular cluster about 27,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagitarrius. The pulsar emits incredibly intense high-energy gamma rays, which the researchers detected and studied using NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. Their analysis suggests the pulsar is just 25 million years old — a baby as far as these stars go, for millisecond pulsars tend to be a billion years old or so, researchers said.

The pulsar's extreme brightness and youth challenge current ideas about how super-bright millisecond pulsars form and how widespread they may be, researchers said. "These anomalously energetic millisecond pulsars must be forming at a rate similar to the previously known, more normal millisecond
pulsars — at least in globular clusters, but possibly in the whole universe as well," said study lead author Paulo Freire of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany. "In a sense, this pulsar would be the proverbial tip of a hidden new iceberg."

Exotic, fast-spinning stars
Pulsars form when massive stars die in supernova explosions and their remnants collapse into compact objects made only of the particles called neutrons. When a mass as great as our sun's is packed into a space the size of a city, the conserved angular momentum causes the resulting neutron star to spin very rapidly and to emit a ray of high-energy light that sweeps around like a lighthouse beam.

This light appears to pulse because astronomers see the beam only when it's pointed at Earth. "Normal" pulsars rotate at a rate between 7 and 3,750 revolutions per minute, but millisecond pulsars can spin much faster — up to 43,000 rotations per minute.

These hyper-spinners are thought to be revved up by accretion of matter from a companion star. Indeed, roughly 80 percent of millisecond pulsars discovered to date are found in binary systems, researchers said. The new study could shed some more light on these exotic objects. The research is detailed online in the Nov. 3 issue of the journal Science. In a separate study, astronomers announced the discovery of nine previously unknown gamma-ray pulsars, also using the Fermi space telescope.

Those pulsars had gone unnoticed because they do not shine brightly despite their high energy level, according to scientists with the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, who announced the find today (Nov. 3). The discovery will be detailed in an upcoming issue of the Astrophysical Journal.
"We used a new kind of hierarchical algorithm which we had originally developed for the search for gravitational waves," said study co-author Bruce Allen, director of the  Albert Einstein Institute in Hanover, Germany, in a statement. "It's like digging for diamonds or gold: It’s very exciting when you find something."

Looking in gamma-ray light
For the J1823-3021A study, researchers trained the Fermi space telescope on the globular cluster NGC 6624. Globular clusters are good places to look for millisecond pulsars, because the dense packing of stars facilitates the formation of binary systems.

Freire and his colleagues picked up a lot of gamma-ray emission from the cluster — so much that they initially thought the light was coming from 100 or so millisecond pulsars. But that wasn't the case.
"We now find that all detectable gamma-ray emission comes from one single millisecond pulsar," Freire told Space.com in an email.

That pulsar is J1823-3021A, which is spinning at about 11,100 revolutions per minute, or one complete turn every 5.44 milliseconds. The team didn't discover the pulsar; it has been known since the 1990s. But its incredible gamma-ray brightness remained undetected until now. J1823-3021A also appears to have a much stronger magnetic field than other millisecond pulsars. The exotic object's combination of characteristics is likely to have astronomers scratching their heads, Freire said. "It challenges the way we believe millisecond pulsars form," he said. "It was not thought that, for the spin period of this object (5.44 ms), they could be so energetic and have such a high magnetic field."

The researchers aren't yet sure whether millisecond pulsar formation theories will need a tweak or a serious overhaul. "We are currently investigating a number of possibilities," study co-author Michael Kramer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, said in a statement. "Nature might even be forming millisecond pulsars in a way we have not anticipated."

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Something strange is happening on the planet Uranus. A fuzzy white spot has appeared on its frigid blue cloud tops, 1.8 billion miles from the sun, and astronomers say it's probably a giant methane storm, something unimaginable on Earth.

What do you do if you're a serious astronomer, poring over the images from the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii? You go on Facebook -- not some obscure scholarly network-- to invite amateurs to join in. (Images are being collected by an organization called the International Outer Planet Watch.)

"This is a science that's for the public," said Heidi Hammel, a planetary scientist who's studied the outer ice giants Uranus and Neptune, the seventh and eighth planets from the sun. "There is action going on right now, and you can be part of it."

When she said right now, she meant now. The first images of the storm on Uranus only came in on Thursday night, and it may only be 3-5 days before the storm fades from view. Hammel has filed a request for the Hubble telescope in Earth orbit to take a look at Uranus on a "target of opportunity" basis. If enough amateur astronomers chime in, Hubble will be diverted from other observations to turn toward Uranus before the moment passes."If you could look at it up close, I imagine it would look like a really tall anvil cloud," said Hammel.

It may be roughly similar in formation to a thunderstorm on Earth -- except that it's hundreds of miles across, if not more, high in Uranus' atmosphere. Since the storm is not obscured by clouds above it, it appears 10 times brighter than the rest of the planet, report astronomers who have seen it this week. To amateurs, even with fairly large telescopes, it may show only as a faint dot. But if enough chip in, they may be able to calculate how quickly Uranus' frozen clouds are turning. Scientists say the planet rotates in just over 17 hours.

Uranus has had a tough time as planets go. It is just on the edge of visibility from Earth, appearing to the naked eye as a dim star -- if you live in a place with crystal-clear skies, far from cities. The astronomer John Flamsteed put it on a star chart as long ago as 1690, but only in 1781 did Sir William Herschel realize it was a planet, moving against the background of stars in the sky.

It takes 84 Earth years to orbit the sun once, and it's turned on its side relative to the other planets, perhaps because it was slammed -- twice, according to one computer model -- by debris as the solar system was forming. It's only been visited by one space probe, Viking 2 in 1986, which sped by on its way to Neptune and on out toward the stars.

So did Uranus have a bad day last week? "No, it had a great day," said Hammel. "It's great when a planet that gets no respect does something really interesting."

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The Purdue University North Central Astronomy Club will host a presentation about "the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and other experiments in the coming decade by Carl Rodriguez, a Northwestern University Ph.D. student, on Tuesday, Nov. 22 at noon in the Library-Student-Faculty Assembly Hall, Room 02. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

The Astronomy Club encourages persons of all interests who have a curiosity about Astronomy and the solar system to attend and learn more. Non-scientists are welcomed.

When completed in 2014, LIGO will be the first detector sensitive enough to regularly see the collisions of neutron stars and black holes in the local universe. When two massive objects such as neutron stars or black holes collide, they release huge amounts of energy, creating ripples in spacetime known as gravitational waves. The ripples carry detailed information about the objects that created them, offering an exciting new look into the gravitational nature of the cosmos. To that end, an international effort is underway to detect gravitational waves.

This talk will give an overview of the past, present and future of gravitational wave physics and detail the potential of LIGO and other scientific work being developed. Area teachers are welcome to bring their students for this informative, thought-provoking talk. There will be time for discussion and questions and answers.

The Astronomy Club holds talks on current events of what is happening in the Astronomy field throughout the academic year and has hosted a variety of informational presentations, as well as night-sky observation nights, using a high power telescope to view the night sky. All events are open to the public.

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