Astronomers

Congressional wrangling over the future of the overdue, over-budget James Webb Space Telescope has split astronomers in a struggle over billions in funding. Astrophysicists worry that action in the U.S. House to eliminate funding for the Webb project, which already employs hundreds of people in Greenbelt and Baltimore, would extinguish a century-long quest for knowledge about the origins of the universe, just as it seemed to be headed for new triumphs. "The project is the core of astronomy; not only astrophysics, and not just in the U.S., but in the world," said astrophysicist Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Gart Westerhout, an internationally known radio astronomer who established the astronomy department at the University of Maryland, College Park and was scientific director at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, died Sunday of congestive heart failure at the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville. He was 85. The son of an architect and a writer, he was born and raised in The Hague, Netherlands, where he also graduated from high school. Dr. Westerhout earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics, physics and astronomy in 1950 from the University of Leiden, and earned his master's degree in the discipline in 1954.

European astronomers have found what could be the first habitable planet outside our solar system, a sphere a bit bigger than Earth covered by rocks or oceans, 20.5 light-years away. Researchers aren't sure whether the planet has oxygen, carbon or other essential building blocks of life. But it orbits at the right distance from its star to make conditions ripe for an essential ingredient to life as we know it. "The temperature is right to have water," said Stephane Udry, an astronomer at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland and lead author of the report published today as a letter to the editor in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Did you watch the transit of Venus last night? Clouds threatened, but it sounds like they cleared in time for most to see the transit. Check out the photos above and to the left to see how others saw it. Or if you have your own to share, upload them here . Was it all you thought it would (or wouldn't) be? E-mail me at sdance@baltsun.com or tweet to @MdWeather with your reaction. Read more about the transit in my  story from Sunday's paper : When Venus passed between Earth and the sun 251 years ago Tuesday, scientists scribbled downobservations that helped calculate a rough estimate of the size of our solar system.

Call it the case of the noisy neighbor.Since the nearby galaxy Cygnus A was first discovered in the 1960s, scientists have puzzled over how it churns out tremendous amounts of radio energy, making it the second strongest source of radio waves in the cosmos.Now three astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have stumbled onto evidence that a quasar -- a mysterious object that can emit a trillion times as much energy as the sun -- nestles at Cygnus A's core, broadcasting all that radio babble.

The universe is a far younger and smaller place than anyone suspected, two independent teams of distinguished astronomers announced yesterday. In fact, the universe may be only about half as old as the oldest stars and galaxies it contains.That fundamental paradox -- sure to keep philosophers, theologians and astronomers awake at night -- is one byproduct of the newest and most accurate estimates of the size and age of the universe.Taken together, the new findings promise to startle the astronomical world by challenging some long-held assumptions about the properties of the universe, which encompasses all known matter and space, since it evolved from a primeval fireball.

Scientists may get one of their last chances today to solve the stubborn puzzle of a tiny, unidentified object now more than a half-million miles from Earth.Steve Ostro, an astronomer with NASA, will try to use radio telescopes in its Deep Space Network in Goldstone, Calif., to bounce radar waves off the 30-foot-long object, which is drifting behind the planet like a cork in the wake of an ocean liner.Donald K. Yeomans, another scientist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said Dr. Ostro has also arranged to try again Dec. 20, using the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

In new observations of a distant region of primitive stars, astronomers have found the oldest known planet, a huge gaseous object almost three times as old as Earth and nearly as old as the universe. The discovery, based on measurements by the Hubble Space Telescope, challenged scientists to rethink theories of how, when and where planets form. It is tantalizing evidence, astronomers said, that planets began appearing billions of years earlier than previously thought and therefore might be more abundant.

WASHINGTON - Poor Albert. For 89 years, Albert has been lost - in space. The 2-mile-wide asteroid was discovered in 1911, but when later generations of astronomers looked for it, it wasn't where it was supposed to be. Of the 14,788 asteroids that have been found, numbered and plotted for two centuries, a handful have gotten lost. All were rediscovered, except for Albert 719."Let's say it would have been in the cold-case file by now," said Gareth Williams, the camera-shy astronomer who helped track down Albert.

After just five days of observations at their New Mexico observatory last summer, astronomers discovered what they say are the two most distant quasars ever observed, plus another now ranked No. 4.A member of the international Sloan Digital Sky Survey team, which includes the Johns Hopkins University, where news of the discovery was released yesterday, said the new quasars were ** detected at perhaps 15 billion light-years from Earth -- so distant that...

When Venus passed between Earth and the sun 251 years ago Tuesday, scientists scribbled down observations that helped calculate a rough estimate of the size of our solar system. Using crude telescopes, they watched the yellow planet move across the sun's face as a tiny black disk. There is little more the same rare phenomenon, known as a transit of Venus, will reveal about our closest neighbors in space when it occurs again Tuesday. But astronomers will be watching nonetheless, hoping it will teach them to better discover and investigate planets that are much farther away and could sustain life.

First, the bad news: The Andromeda galaxy, an agglomeration of 1 trillion stars that is visible to the naked eye, is hurtling through space at 250,000 miles per hour — and it's coming right at us. What's more, NASA astronomers in Baltimore said Thursday, while Andromeda barrels into our Milky Way, a companion galaxy will join in what the space agency is billing as a "titanic collision. " Now, the good news: With Andromeda still 2.5 million light years away, the collision won't take place for another 4 billion years, the astronomers said.

It's rare to witness the entirety of a murder. But that's how some local scientists investigated exactly what happened during a fatal attack in 2010. The victim? A star — a massive red giant — 2.7 million light-years away that had lost its outer layers in previous brushes with its attacker. The perpetrator was a massive black hole that swallowed the star and spewed its guts out into space over the course of a year. A team led by a Johns Hopkins University researcher conducted the probe, and astronomers say its findings could lead to discoveries that shed new light on the central role black holes may play in the growth of galaxies.

Tuesday's announcement that Hopkins astronomer Adam G. Riess will share this year's Nobel Prize in physics acknowledges his huge contribution to scientific knowledge. From the study of giant exploding stars millions of light-years from Earth, Mr. Riess and his colleagues, Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Australia, deduced the astonishing hypothesis that our universe is being violently blown apart by an immensely powerful, previously unsuspected force.

Congressional wrangling over the future of the overdue, over-budget James Webb Space Telescope has split astronomers in a struggle over billions in funding. Astrophysicists worry that action in the U.S. House to eliminate funding for the Webb project, which already employs hundreds of people in Greenbelt and Baltimore, would extinguish a century-long quest for knowledge about the origins of the universe, just as it seemed to be headed for new triumphs. "The project is the core of astronomy; not only astrophysics, and not just in the U.S., but in the world," said astrophysicist Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

After years of planning, a local astronomy group is moving closer toward building the first publicly accessible observatory in Howard County. The Howard Astronomical League, a club of amateur astronomers, planned to submit architectural drawings to the county this week as an initial step in a more formal application to construct the observatory at Alpha Ridge Community Park in Marriottsville. Joel Goodman, observatory chairman for the league, said the application marks the culmination of more than a decade of design work and fundraising.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope say they have for the first time detected the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. What they found wasn't very appealing - sodium, in an atmosphere hot enough to melt pocket change. But scientists were delighted they could learn anything at all about the environment on a planet 150 light-years away. And they're hoping their discovery will be the first in a series that will compare the atmospheres of a host of "extra-solar" planets, perhaps eventually leading them to one that is hospitable to life.

Astronomers have for the first time used the bending of light waves by a star to identify a planet 17,000 light-years away, an achievement that could set the stage for the discovery of more extrasolar planets, especially smaller planets similar in size to Earth. Researchers have so far identified more than 100 extrasolar planets by observing slight wobbles in a star's trajectory caused by a planet circling it or by observing small changes in a star's brightness when a planet passes in front of it. But those methods work only for planets larger than Jupiter, and most of the planets discovered so far orbit very close to their stars - indicating that the planetary systems are not very much like our own. Although the planet discovered using the new technique, called gravitational microlensing, is about the size of Jupiter, the method should work equally well with smaller planets, researchers said.

With time running out for the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers in Baltimore and around the world are gearing up for the biggest research project ever mounted on the orbiting observatory. Later this year, astronomers from dozens of institutions will begin gathering images of more than 250,000 of the most distant galaxies in the universe. They will seek answers to some of astronomy's biggest questions - queries that go to the origins of the universe itself. There is a sense of urgency to the effort.

F or more than a quarter-century, Maryland has capped the interest rates for short-term consumer loans and has kept the storefront payday lenders and their rip-off financing plans at bay. But exploiting a possible loophole in state regulations, lenders have shifted tactics and found a way to charge Maryland consumers the equivalent of 600 percent annual interest rates and higher. That's a far cry from the existing 24 percent to 33 percent cap in state law. But these unscrupulous companies sidestep the regulations with an accounting trick - a hefty origination fee to broker the maximum-interest-rate loan.