The idea of a liquid mirror is an old one, and some experimental liquid-mirror telescopes have been built. But the potential of the concept for astronomy is only now reaching fruition. The world's first dedicated astronomical observatory with a liquid-mirror telescope at a top-class observing s...
Title: The shortest period field contact binary Authors: Slavek M. Rucinski, Theodor Pribulla (Department of Astronomy, University of Toronto) Photometric and spectroscopic results for the contact binary GSC 01387-00475 (ASAS 083128+1953.1) are presented. The existence of this binary wit...
An unidentified flying object exploded at about 10:00 AM on May 27th over the northern part of Phu Quoc Island, the Vietnam News Agency reported. This is a region off the coast of the southern province of Kien Giang. Col. Nguyen Van Qui, military chief of the island district, reported the explosion an...
It was one of the islands of chalk left when the sea broke through to form the English Channel in 6500 BC: the others are now beneath the sea. It was left separated from the mainland by what became known as the Wantsum Channel, until the deposition of silt from the River Stour along the coast joined the Isl...
A curious case of Americans versus Iran has the Tehran government asking for Washington to intervene and the University of Chicago defending the Islamic regime in court.
At issue is an extremely valuable collection of ancient Persian cuneiform tablets that victims of a terror bombing want to...
A magnitude 15.3 supernova, 2008cn, was discovered on the 21st May, 2008, by the Perth Observatory, in the spiral galaxy NGC 4603 located in the constellation Centaurus. The supernova is located 4".7 east and 23".2 north of...
Asteroid 2008 HJ was discovered on 24th April by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR), five days before it passed within 1.1 million km (less than 3 lunar distances) of the Earth on 29th April, 18:00 UT. The 12 x 24 metre Ap...
One of the largest icebergs in the world a hulk three times the size of Greater London will now be known as Melting Bob after a six-year-old boy won a competition to give it a name. Max Dolan, from Winchester, beat 500 entrants in a naming contest set by the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge Uni...
Title: The ultra-compact binary 4U1850-087 observed with INTEGRAL: hard X-ray emission from an X-ray burster
Authors: L. Sidoli (1), A. Paizis (1), A. Bazzano (2), S. Mereghetti (1) ((1)-INAF-IASF Milano; (2)-INAF-IASF Roma, ITALY)
The X-ray burster 4U1850-087, locat...
ESA is launching a new initiative to develop a roadmap for finding Earth-like planets. Searching for rocky planets around other stars, in the hopes of finding an Earth-like world, is a top scientific goal in ESA's Cosmic Vision programme. Achieving this ambition requires a great deal of technolo...
Iowa State University has established an Asteroid Deflection Research Centre that will bring together scientists from around the world to develop asteroid deflection technologies. Read more
A magnitude 10 nova in Ophiuchus was discovered on the 25th May, 2008, by several Japanese observers; -- K. Nishiyama, Kurume, Fukuoka-ken, and F. Kabashima, Miyaki-cho, Saga-ken -- H. Nishimura, Kakegawa, Shizuoka-ken -- K. Haseda, Toyohashi, Aichi; vi...
Unmanned vehicles will fly into the crater of an offshore volcano during the next three weeks to map it at high precision and search for possible mineral deposits. In a New Zealand-led mission that has parallels to planetary exploration, two state-of-the-art robotic underwater vehicles will be d...
