is now online. This was an all-news program, thanks to the flood of press releases issued at this year's Winter Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, an annual, huge conference with literally hundreds of Astronomers in attendance. With the exception of meetings of the International Astronomical Union, these meetings are by far the largest gathering of Astronomers in the world - with hundreds of talks and posters being presented. I was only to go through about half of all the press releases generated at this event on this show - which is a small fraction of all the results presented, and talked about:
- News: Registration deadline for JPL's Space History Educator Conference is January 22nd (today!), go here for more info; NASA's annual moonbuggy race to be helf on April 4-5 at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, registration deadline is February 1st, and go to http://moonbuggy.msfc.nasa.gov for more info; NASA releases a new Astronomy book called "Touch the Invisibly Sky" intended for the blind and hard of seeing; new version of Google Sky is released; initial release of data from the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey; NASA announces detail of next Hubble servicing mission, which will include installation of new scientific instruments and hopefully repairs of broken ones; NASA's Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter undergoing final round of testing before launch.
- Solar System: Ulysses flies over the North Pole of the Sun just as the next solar cycle begins; Messenger completes first flyby past Mercury - required to slow it down so it can eventually orbit this planet starting in 2011; Harvard astronomers and geoscientists report that Earth about as low mass of a planet which could sustain life, since if it had any less mass it would not have plate tectonics; lowest frequency radar echo from Moon ever was detected, offering new insight to what is just below the Lunar surface.
- Milky Way: Evidence that a peculiar object orbiting a very low mass star (brown dwarf 2M1207A, which has a mass only 25 times that of Jupiter) is a rock just smaller than Saturn creating by the collision and merging of two planetisimals - rocky objects which are believed to form the building blocks of planets; gas and dust disks - similar to the ones where planets are believed to form - detected around two stars (BP Piscium and TYCHO 4144 329 2) much older than expected to still have such structures; Milky Way might contain hundreds of black holes which have been kicked out of globular clusters - very old, very dense clusters of stars; "light echo" predicted from hot gas falling into rapidly spinning black holes.
- Calendar of upcoming science events in the greater New York City / Poughkeepsie area.
- Result of the week: New result from observation done using the Integral satellite that gamma-rays - extremely high energy light particles - in the plane of the Milky Way associated with positrons (anti-electrons, particles with the same mass but opposite change than electrons) is not centered on the Galactic Center but slightly offset which strongly suggests that the positrons are not produced by annihilating dark matter but by some Astronomical source, most likely in the disk of very hot gas surrounding black holes which have a star orbiting them.
Thanks a lot for listening,
Yosi
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