Local Man Has Own Launch Pad to Stars

PLEASANTON — When a team of planet hunters announced the discovery of a new extrasolar planet on June 30, it was already old news to amateur astronomer Ron Bissinger.
The day before the announcement, Bissinger, tipped off by a member of the research team, had detected evidence of planet HD 149026b from an elaborate miniature observatory he built in his back yard..........

Tri-Valley Herald

Dust-enshrouded Star Like the Sun

Astronomers report tremendous quantities of warm dusty debris surrounding a star with luminosity and mass similar to the sun's, but located 300 light-years from Earth. The extraordinary nature of the dust indicates a violent history of cosmic collisions between asteroids and comets, or perhaps even between planets. The discovery is published July 21 in Nature..........

ScienceDaily

A New Planet in a Three Star System

A newfound planet has three suns, a scientist says—a discovery that highlights the unimagined beauties the cosmos still has in store for us, suggests planets are even more common than previously believed, and could rewrite theories of planet formation..........

World Science

A New Planet With Massive Core

Astronomers have discovered an extrasolar planet with the largest core of any known planet. The discovery is especially exciting to planet formation theorists, because it provides extremely strong observational evidence in support of the "core accretion" theory, one of two main theories for how giant planets form..........

Read More Tim Stephens and Denize Springer, UC Santa Cruz Currents, July 11, 2005

Minerals on Mars

From space and even on the surface, Mars just looks dry, reddish and rocky as far as the camera can see. But there's actually a pretty complex world of minerals under that surface layer of basalt. By studying the surface of Mars with Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, NASA scientists have turned up very interesting surface features which hint at the hidden minerals underneath. This research is published in the latest edition of the Journal Nature. Read More

Universe Today July 7, 2005

Comet Impact Succeeds

IMPACT! Scientists blast projectile into comet

July 4, 2005
Special to World Science

Scientists shot a washing machine-sized projectile into a comet, eight times faster than a rifle bullet. The impact created an enormous blast visible on images sent back to Earth, and whose size surprised even some mission scientists.

This image from NASA TV is a view from Deep Impact's flyby showing the impactor colliding with comet Tempel 1. (NASA)

NASA researchers confirmed the impact at 1:58 a.m. Eastern U.S. time, in a project designed to better understand what comets are made of.

A sequence of images sent back by cameras on the projectile revealed growing amounts of detail on the rocky-looking comet as a huge crater came to view. Later, images showed a bright blast showering off the speeding, potato-shaped object.

Now, the task of analyzing the images and other data from the mission begins..........Read More

Top 25 Unanswered Science Questions

The journal, Science, has posted it's top 25 unanswered science questions. Just reading the questions is an education in itself.