Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Feb 3 Recap

This week's journal club was hosted by Prof. Paul Delaney. Some of the topics we discussed were:

1. This week NASA announced their new budget plan. News stories about Constellation has been cancelled, and NASA gave the human spaceflight to 5 commercial companies. Read the details of NASA budget at its homepage.

2. Hubble Space Telescope caught a head-on collision between two asteroids. Read the news here.

3. "What else is out there?" appears in the March edition of Sky & Telescope, discussed about whether earth-size objects exist in the Kuiper Belt, and the detection of interstellar comets.

4. Study of W33A, a Massive Young Stellar Object (MYSO), shows that massive stars form in much the same way as in smaller stars. But planets is less likely to be formed  around massive stars. Read the story here.

5. A stellar-mass black hole is found in a binary system in NGC300. It is the second most massive (15 solar masses), and the most far-away (outside the Local Group) stellar-mass black hole ever found. Its company is a Wolf-Rayet star. Read the story here.

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