Astronomers catch ‘planet-mania’
Greaves and colleagues used the SCUBA instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to look at the dust around Epsilon Eridani. SCUBA operates at submillimetre wavelengths, where the glare...
ESA demands new money
Antonio Rodota, ESA’s director general, has been campaigning to increase the amount of industrial involvement in the space agency. However it has been clear for many months that there would be s...
Sloan Survey sees first light
The 2.5 m Sloan telescope is based at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The telescope has an unusually wide field of view and one of the most advanced digital cameras ever built. The camera cons...
South Africa approves new telescope
Astronomers involved with the project hope to use a lightweight multi-segment design similar to the Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) in Texas, which cost only about 20 per cent of what it would cost to bu...
Has Hubble photographed an extrasolar planet?
Terebey and colleagues believe that the new planet was in orbit around two stars – TMR-1A and -1B – before it was ejected by a gravitational slingshot mechanism. The planet then created a ...
First light for Europe’s new telescope
The VLT uses active optics to reduce the effect of atmospheric turbulence on observations. In this technique the optical quality of a star is continually monitored against a reference star and the sur...
The biggest bang since the big bang
The 50 second burst, known as GRB971214, was detected by the two satellites. The Italian/Dutch BeppoSAX satellite gave the precise position of the blast, while NASA’s Compton Gamma Ray Observato...
Sampling micrometeorites at the South Pole
The middle of Antarctica is an ideal place to look for ‘survivors’ of the burn-up because material in the region suffer little, if any, chemical or physical weathering and there is very li...
German elections delay ESA shake-up
The meeting was due to be held in Belgium at the end of June. However, Yvan Ylieff, Belgium’s minister for scientific policy and organizer of the meeting, has announced that disagreements over t...
Astronomers focus on thefuture
The meeting, attended by 200 astronomers, discussed the future of more than 40 facilities and drew up a plan to provide a basis for budget discussions with the ministry for education and research. It ...
