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 * * * SKY & TELESCOPE's WEEKLY NEWS BULLETIN - February 18, 2005 * * *

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Welcome to S&T's Weekly News Bulletin. Images, the full text of stories
abridged here, and other enhancements are available on our Web site,
SkyandTelescope.com, at the URLs provided below. (If the links don't work,
just manually type the URLs into your Web browser.) Clear skies!

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THE BRIGHTEST BLAST

On December 27, 2004, more than a dozen spacecraft recorded the brightest
event from outside the solar system ever observed in the history of
astronomy. The spacecraft, which included Earth-orbiting satellites as
well as interplanetary probes such as Cassini, Mars Odyssey, and Ulysses,
picked up a powerful burst of gamma rays and X-rays from one of the most
exotic beasts in the galactic zoo: a magnetar. These bizarre objects are
neutron stars possessing magnetic fields a million billion times more
powerful than Earth's field, or some 1,000 times greater that those of
normal neutron stars.

The "superflare," from a magnetar named SGR 1806-20, irradiated Earth with
more total energy than a powerful solar flare. Yet this object is an
estimated 50,000 light-years away in Sagittarius, on the far side of the
Milky Way galaxy behind dense interstellar clouds. "This is mind-boggling
when you think about how far away it is," says Kevin C. Hurley (University
of California, Berkeley), one of the lead investigators....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1464_1.asp

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PICTURE IMPERFECT: NASA'S SPITZER SPACE TELESCOPE

NASA officials acknowledge that two of the space agency's premier orbiting
telescopes share a common problem: flawed optics. One is the 15-year-old,
multibillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope, which made "spherical aberrati
on" a household term before being rehabilitated in a spectacular rescue
mission by Space Shuttle astronauts. The other, overlooked until this
week, is the $720 million infrared Spitzer Space Telescope.

The problem has been hiding in plain sight since NASA released the first
Spitzer image on September 3, 2003, a week after launch. At that point the
85-centimeter (33-inch) reflector -- then called the Space Infrared
Telescope Facility -- hadn't yet been focused, so its bloated, triangular
star images didn't raise any eyebrows....

> http://SkyandTelescope.com/news/article_1463_1.asp

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ASTRO NEWS BRIEFS

Astronomers Celebrate Pluto's 75th Birthday

In 1929 Lowell Observatory's director, Vesto M. Slipher, tasked a young
Clyde William Tombaugh to search for "what else is out there beyond
Neptune." Tombaugh was supposed to find Percival Lowell's predicted Planet
X. One year later, on February 18, 1930, he spotted Pluto.

The status of the ninth planet has come under heavy debate in recent
years. Astronomers now realize that Tombaugh's find is the largest known
member of an entire class of objects known as the Kuiper Belt. These
ice-rock bodies, circling the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune, have helped
astronomers better understand the formation of our solar system and other
extrasolar planetary systems. But Ceres, the largest asteroid in the
asteroid belt, isn't classified as a planet, so why should the largest
Kuiper Belt object have such an honorable distinction? Pluto's status
remains a hot topic despite the International Astronomical Union's ruling
in favor of its current classification as "planet." In December 1994,
Tombaugh wrote a letter to the editor published in SKY & TELESCOPE where
he explained his opinion on the matter:

"Pluto started out as the ninth planet, a supported fulfillment of
Percival Lowell's prediction of Planet X. Let's simply retain Pluto as the
ninth major planet. After all, there is no Planet X. For 14 years, I
combed two-thirds of the entire sky down to 17th magnitude, and no more
planets showed up. I did the job thoroughly and correctly... Pluto was
your last chance for a major planet."

Winds on Titan

Due to a programming error between the European Space Agency's Huygens
probe and NASA's Cassini orbiter, some of the former's observations were
thought to be lost forever. One of the missing measurements was the
Doppler Wind Experiment, designed to profile Titan's atmospheric wind
speeds as Huygens floated toward the moon's surface.

Fortunately, a worldwide armada of radio telescopes also listened for
Huygens's signal. From those observations scientists have learned that the
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