The next meeting of the S*T*A*R Astronomy Club will be at 8pm on Thursday December 4th at the Monmouth Museum on the campus of Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, NJ. Directions can be found here. Our speaker will be S*T*A*R's own Arturo Cisneros who will talk on 'Why will the sun shine for billions of years?'.

NEWS

Hubble Work Completed! After five amazing days, spacewalking astronauts finished repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope on Monday and shut the doors to the treasured observatory, which will never be touched by human hands again. N(ly hit us)EO Here's a high hard one that just zipped past our ears yesterday afternoon. Herschel Telescope Here's a nice article about the upcoming European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel telescope, which will study in the far-infrared and sub-millimetre range. More than two thousand liters (!) of liquid helium will cool the detectors to just above absolute zero. Note the link to the Planck Telescope project (which will ride the same Ariane rocket) near the bottom. It will study details in the Cosmic Microwave Background. Read more... Black Hole in NGC253? A sharp-eyed instrument on the Very Large Telescope has given astronomers a peek at the heart of a nearby galaxy, revealing a host of young, massive and dusty stellar nurseries and a possible twin of our own Milky Way's supermassive black hole. The galaxy, dubbed NGC 253, is one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky. It is also known as the Sculptor Galaxy, because it is located in the Sculptor constellation.

A Bigger Milky Way New research results are now being reported from the current meeting of American Astronomical Society. There have been several recent hints that the Milky Way might not actually be smaller than the Andromeda galaxy. Now some clear new measurement results support that, along with several other new properties of our home galaxy. Alien Found? A comet orbiting our Sun may be an interloper from another star system. Comet Machholz 1 isn't like other comets. David Schleicher of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, measured the chemical makeup of 150 comets, and found that they all had similar levels of the chemical cyanogen (CN) except for Machholz 1, which has less than 1.5% of the normal level. Along with some other comets, it is also low on the molecules carbon2 and carbon3. Dark matter region nearby? A balloon-borne instrument soaring high over Antarctica has found evidence of a possible large clump of mysterious so-called dark matter relatively close to our solar system, scientists said on Wednesday. It detected an unexpected amount of very high energy cosmic ray electrons coming from an unknown source within about 3,000 light years of the solar system. Tool Bag Found! Amateur astronomers have been monitoring a shiny tool bag that has been orbiting Earth ever since it was dropped last week by an astronaut during a spacewalk outside the international space station. After sunset on Saturday, Edward Light, using 10 x 50 binoculars, spotted the bag in space while he scanned the sky from his backyard in Lakewood, N.J., SpaceWeather.com reported. On the same night, Keven Fetter of Brockville, Ontario, video-recorded the bag as it passed by the star Eta Pisces in the constellation Pisces.

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