Astronomy

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.

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. Less frequently, exotic denizens of deep space would pop up -- blinding quasars and supernovae, flaring up as brightly on the bank of TV screens as entire galaxies.

A gamma-ray burst bright enough to be seen by the naked eye occurred when a collapsing star ejected a jet almost directly at Earth, researchers reported Thursday in the journal Nature. Emissions reached Earth on March 19 from a star in the constellation Bootes about 7.5 billion light-years away. Astronomers said that, considering its distance from Earth, it was the brightest explosion ever observed.

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.

Talk about your cosmic pileups. An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday. Researchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November. The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan.

Talk about your cosmic pileups. An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday. Researchers attached to NASA's Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November. The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75. A 1-in-75 shot is "wildly unusual," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth's neighborhood.

Young galaxies, so faint that scientists struggled to prove they were there, have been discovered by aiming two of the world's most powerful telescopes at a single patch of sky for nearly 100 hours. An international research team has identified 27 pre-galactic fragments, "teenager galaxies," which they hope will help astronomers understand how our own Milky Way reached adulthood. The telescopes allowed scientists to see back 11 billion years or more, to 2 billion years after the Big Bang.

In the vastness of space, how far is far? That question has simmered in G. Fritz Benedict's mind since he was 8, when a family friend took him into the backyard of his home and pointed to the constellation Orion. "Something in my brain went 'snap,' " said Benedict, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin. The experience set him on a lifelong quest to answer one of the most arcane questions in astronomy: How exactly do you measure the universe?

Astronomers have unexpectedly identified a small number of white dwarf stars with pure carbon atmospheres and no traces of the usual hydrogen or helium. The stars apparently violently expelled all the light gases in their atmospheres, leaving a bare core in each that is primarily composed of carbon and oxygen, the team reported Thursday in the journal Nature. This would represent a new pathway for stellar evolution. The stars are unusually hot, 18,000 to 24,000 degrees Kelvin.

For the last 20 years, UC Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy has been the world's leading planet finder. Of the 260-odd planets that have been discovered in other solar systems, Marcy and his team have found 150. His most recent discovery, announced last week, is a fifth planet orbiting a star called 55 Cancri, about 41 light-years from Earth. Marcy, 53, sat down in his office to talk about the friendly and not-so-friendly competition to find the first Earth-like planet that could harbor life.