Thursday, August 21, 2008

Astronomy News

Massive New Object Discovered at Edge of the Solar System. "A "minor planet" with the awesomely poetic name 2006 SQ372 is just over two billion miles from Earth, a bit closer than the planet Neptune has been discovered in the inner Oort Cloud. This lump of ice and rock is beginning the return leg of a 22,500-year journey that will take it to a distance of 150 billion miles, nearly 1,600 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, according to a team of researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II)." Here's more on it.

Dark Matter is Missing From Cosmic Voids "Cosmic voids really are devoid of matter. Astronomers have found that even the pervasive 'dark matter' which accounts for about 80% of the mass of the universe is not present in these voids, which are areas of vast emptiness in space that can be tens of millions of light-years across. 'Astronomers have wondered for a quarter-century whether these voids were 'too big' or 'too empty' to be explained by gravity alone,' said University of Chicago researcher Jeremy Tinker, who led the new study using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey II (SDSS-II). 'Our analysis shows that the voids in these surveys are exactly as big and as empty as predicted by the 'standard' theory of the universe.'"

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