Astronomy

A 2,100-year-old bronze and iron computer that predicted eclipses and other astronomical events also showed the cycle of the Greek Olympics and the related games that led up to it, researchers reported today. The research team also has been able to decipher all the month names from the heavily corroded fragments of the so-called Antikythera mechanism, providing the first concrete evidence that an astronomical scheme devised by the Greek astronomer Geminos was put to practical use.

It's fair to say that Dan Long has seen more of the universe than anyone but God. Month after month, year after year, Long has sat in a windowless room atop a windy mountain peak, watching the heavens scroll by on 12 monitors connected to the Apache Point Observatory's 98-inch telescope. He saw stars, galaxies and clusters of galaxies banded together like giant herds of animals on an unending savanna roll by.

Reaching a milestone in the search for Earth-like planets in the universe, two teams of astronomers say they have parted the curtains of space to take the first pictures of planets beyond our solar system. The first team, led by UC Berkeley researchers, used the Hubble Space Telescope to take a picture of a giant planet orbiting the star Fomalhaut, 25 light-years away. "It's almost science fiction," said Berkeley astronomer Eugene Chiang.

Kara Knack has stars in her eyes. And moons and suns and planets. There are thousands and thousands, to paraphrase the late Carl Sagan, the great popularizer of astronomy whose enthusiasm has guided Knack's decades-long support of the Griffith Observatory. Celestially themed objects dangle from the ceiling of her residence in Malibu. They hang on the walls and adorn the mantelpiece, couches and chairs. They are embedded in the soil of her garden and stacked in the cupboards of her kitchen.

More than 400 years after Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe challenged established wisdom about the heavens by analyzing a strange new light in the sky, scientists say they've nailed down just what he saw. They knew the light came from a supernova, a huge star explosion. But what kind? A new study confirms that it was the common kind that involves the thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf star with a nearby companion.

Google has already planted its flag on Earth, the moon and Mars. The universe could be next. The Internet search company has struck a partnership with scientists building a huge sky-scanning telescope, with hopes of helping the public gain access to digital footage of asteroids, supernovas and distant galaxies. "Frankly, I could see the day when they would be our sort of window to the general public," said Donald Sweeney, manager of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or LSST.

THE sight of cars piling onto Interstate 5 is a familiar one to many. But in the multimedia art installation "Airlight SoCal," the air pollution surrounding the vehicles is the focal point. The freeway is depicted via a real-time webcam, as its footage and audio mutate based on incoming smog data from the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

The newest and most heavily used camera on the Hubble Space Telescope shut down over the weekend and appears to be permanently damaged, NASA said Monday. Though other cameras on Hubble remain operative, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which is used to peer back to the earliest and most remote galaxies in the universe, appears to be irreparable and will have to be replaced on the next Hubble servicing mission in September 2008.

Archeologists have solved the mystery of the Thirteen Towers, a line of low stone structures that have spanned an arid Peruvian slope like a massive set of prehistoric teeth for 2,400 years. The towers lined up outside the citadel at Chankillo are a massive solar observatory that marks not only the summer and winter solstices, but also the days and weeks of the year.

Caltech astronomers have detected a family of rocky objects in the Kuiper Belt that were formed by something hitting an object larger than Pluto. Such groups of objects, called collisional families, are common in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the new family is the first to be found in the Kuiper Belt, which is beyond Neptune, more than 3 billion miles from the sun.