PLANETS
It has taken 13 years to pin down the masses of the first extrasolar planets ever detected. The three, in orbit around a pulsar, are the only Earth-sized planets seen so far. By tracking how their movements affect the radio pulses emitted by the pulsar, Maciej Konacki at Caltech and Alexander Wolszcan at Penn State University found two of the planets have masses equivalent to 4.3 and 3.9 Earths. The third was too small to detect.
SUPERNOVAE
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The Nearby Supernova Factory collaboration predicts it will find 100 nearby supernovae by the end of the year. It has already found 44 exploding stars since January by looking for bright bursts from the Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking project.
TELESCOPES
The Global Network of Astronomical Telescopes is to expand. GNAT was begun two years ago with three telescopes spaced around the world, to enable astronomers to monitor continuously changing objects as they move through the sky. It is now to add five more telescopes, and will soon yield data on planets moving in front of their stars.
ALIENS
There’s a flaw in most attempts to search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilisations, according to the SETI Institute in California. Their study shows that the most likely signals, such as sweeping beacons, would show up only very briefly and so be ignored by present searches. New telescopes under construction should finally make these signals detectable.
STARS
Many solar systems could be more complicated than we thought. A Harvard team studying massive stars in 14 binary systems found a third companion star in half of them – a far higher proportion than expected.
MONSTERS
A monster planet is being born. A team at Wesleyan University saw a 48-day eclipse of a star last year, thought to be the first observation of a blob of matter condensing into a planet. Now they’ve discovered a second protoplanet, and this one is even larger than its star. The eclipse lasted 3 years.
