| Friday | 8 October 2004 | 9:41pm MDT | 2004-10-09 UTC 0341 |
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News briefs
SOHO news: The government-published Taiwan Journal has a long article today, “Stargazing hobbyist discovers new comet,” about the September 22nd discovery of C/SOHO-838 by Tsai Yuan-sheng, “Taiwan's first discoverer of a comet using the SOHO images.” Crater news: American Scientist posted an article today about the nature of the scientific debate over whether circular depressions in the Sirente plain of Italy were caused by impacts in the late Roman era. See also articles in Tumbling Stone #18 and #25 [temporary link]. WISE news: NASA has decided to proceed to the preliminary design phase for the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which would launch in 2008. See a University of California at Los Angeles news release from yesterday. The mission's science page states that, among other tasks, it “will be able to measure the diameters of more than 100,000 asteroids” and will study comet tails and the dust/debris disks of the Sun and other stars. |
The Asteroid/Comet Connection's Today's issue status: done, updated
FMOP news: Current NEOCP object SW40HK [now designated 2004 TJ10] was discovered today by FMO Project online volunteer Robert Klein. Extrasolar news: An Astronomy magazine article yesterday tells that a silicate dust belt has been newly discovered 6.4 AU from beta Pictoris in addition to belts already known at 16 and 30 AU. Commentator Steve Desch is quoted: “All the grains we see in Beta Pic were liberated from larger bodies — comets or planetesimals — in the last few thousand years. This is a system that's still in the process of creating terrestrial planets.” (Some of that dust flows into our own Solar System — see news links.) |
