The next MEPCO is coming ... to Bulgaria, in early August, 1999!
For details on this astronomical conference just before the total solar eclipse click here!

---

New: every page on two servers, in Europe and the U.S.!

---

Update # 126 of April 15th, 1999 at 20:15 UTC
(minor additions plus layout changes April 16th)

Not one but three planets for Upsilon Andromedae! It's the first planetary system around a nearby, Sun-like star: Upsilon Andromedae, long known to have one planet, actually has three! Only if you model its radial velocity pattern with three planets can you minimize the residuals, i.e. achieve a near-perfect fit to the data. This is the first multiple planet system ever found around a normal star, other than the nine planets in our Solar System! The closest planet in the Upsilon Andromedae system was detected in 1996 by San Francisco State University astronomers Geoffrey Marcy and R. Paul Butler. Now, after 11 years of telescope observations at Lick Observatory near San Jose, CA, the signals of two additional planets have emerged from the data. In parallel, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA and the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, CO have independently found the two outer planets around Upsilon Andromedae. This first planetary system, found from a survey of 107 stars, offers the first suggestion that planetary systems like our own are abundant in our Milky Way Galaxy. The innermost (and previously known) of the three planets contains at least three-quarters of the mass of Jupiter and orbits only 0.06 AU from the star. It traverses a circular orbit every 4.6 days. The middle planet contains at least twice the mass of Jupiter and takes 242 days to orbit the star once. It resides approximately 0.83 AU from the star, similar to the orbital distance of Venus. The outermost planet has a mass of at least four Jupiters and completes one orbit every 3.5 to 4 years, placing it 2.5 AU from the star. No current theory predicted that so many giant worlds would form around a star.

All the star's planets! How the planetary system looks like (SFSU). A complete paper (Postscript) and more system details (CfA). Press Releases from SFSU, the CfA and NCAR. A Summary by NASA. News reports from ABC, BBC, CNN, Wired and Discovery .

Landsat 7 launched! After a long delay the latest U.S. earth observing satellite went into orbit on April 15: All details and pictures from Florida Today, AstroNet and Discovery, plus stories from ABC and BBC. IUS malfuction dooms DoD satellite While the Titan 4B launch was perfect (see last update), the Inertial Upper Stage of the Dept. of Defense payload didn't work right, and now the satellite is stranded on a wrong orbit and spinning. Lots of articles on the problem - that also threatens the July 9 launch of Chandra! - are provided by Florida Today, see also Astronomy Now. Swatch drops broadcast plans After loud complaints from the radio ham community the watch company has dropped its plans to broadcast semi-commercial messages in the amateur radio band from a small satellite: a BBC Story with links. Galaxy redshift record confirmed An extremely red galaxy in the vicinity of the Hubble Deep Field does indeed have a redshift of 6.68 as reported here last September. Here are the new analysis that was published in Nature on April 15 and reports from ABC, BBC, MSNBC, Discovery. It is likely that soon an even higher measured redshift will be announced - see also Update # 118, last story.

Hubble snaps the Moon! To calibrate the STIS spectrograph the Space Telescope was aimed at the closest target ever: Press Release. Leonid particles captured? Recovered from a stratospheric balloon above 20 km on 17-18 November 1998, at least eight candidate microparticles were collected: A conference abstract, a BBC story and the background. Another meteoroid-collecting balloon flew this month. Service Module delayed again? Even the roll-out of the Russian ISS module on Apr. 26 does not prove that the Sept. 20 launch date will stand: The Russians say it will fly then, but NASA says it will be November. A story from the Houston Chronicle. New asteroid controversy Should the world at large have been informed about a preliminary scientific paper that implies an extremely small but non-zero probability for an impact by 1999 AN 10 in the year 2039? Some astronomers say yes, others no: Here are the paper and reviews of the 'affair by ExploreZone, BBC, SpaceViews and ABC. Evidence for 'hypernova' remnants? Some apparent supernova remnants that seem to have been caused by extremely powerful explosions could actually have been the results of - as far only hypothetical - hypernova explosions. These phenonmena involving the demise of very massive stars are also invoked by some models for gamma ray bursters. A press release ( mirrored here) and ABC and BBC stories.

Have you read the the previous issue?!
All other historical issues can be found in the Archive.

---

This Cosmic Mirror has been visited times since it was issued.

Compiled and written by Daniel Fischer
(send me a mail to [email protected]!), Skyweek