Kind of interesting space news recently...

[odoital]

Maybe you can find a use for some of these things in your games... Kinda interesting...

(from the universetoday.com daily emails)

Are we seeing STV's "god" here?
BLACK HOLE AT THE CENTRE OF OUR GALAXY
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/200...ong/index.html
-------------------------
Using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, astronomers have created one of the most vivid images of Sagittarius A, an area at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy thought to contain a supermassive black hole. The exposure was made over a period of two weeks, and during that time, the region flared up several times; presumably when additional material reached the black hole's event horizon.

DISTANT AND FAST MOVING OBJECT DISCOVERED
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2003/3.cfm
-------------------------
A team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena presented images today of a rare Hyper Extremely Red Object (Hero). This dim object, located near a galaxy 10 billion light years away is traveling away from us at almost the speed of light. In fact, it's so far, and moving so fast, it has gone way past being red-shifted - it's only visible in infrared light.

RING OF STARS FOUND AROUND OUR MILKY WAY
http://www.rpi.edu/web/News/press_re.../milkyway.html
-------------------------
Astronomers announced today that they have discovered a giant ring of stars circling the Milky Way. They believe this ring could contain as many as 500 million stars, and was formed when our galaxy collided with a smaller, dwarf galaxy several billion years ago. Other galaxies have been seen with a halo of stars, including Andromeda.

HUBBLE USES GALACTIC LENSE TO LOOK FURTHER
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/2003/01/text
-------------------------
The Hubble Space Telescope has used a natural 2-million-light-year wide "zoom lens" to look further into space than it normally could. By peering directly through the centre of one of the most massive galactic clusters known, it was able to take advantage of a technique called gravitational lensing to see objects beyond the cluster. Detailed analysis of the image may help shed some light on the mystery of dark matter

[Edit: Some weird formatting errors]

[Kronok]

We also just found a planet farther away than any other found so far.

[odoital]

Hmmn and some more interesting stuff from space.com today...

* Speed of Gravity Measured for First Time
http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...ed_030107.html
The first accurate measurement ever taken of the speed with which gravity propagates shows that it is equal to the speed of light, agreeing nicely with the General Theory of Relativity.

* Astronotes: New Type of Star is a Real Wimp
http://www.space.com/news/astronotes-1.html
What might be a new type of star has been stripped of most of its mass, leaving behind a pitiful little thing astronomers called "degenerate."

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Kronok
We also just found a planet farther away than any other found so far.

Yeah, I just read about it in the paper. A jovian-class, or Class-J to us Trek fans. Its 14 times closer to its star then Mercury is to ours, the "atmosphere is inhospitable" (from the paper, no crap it's a gas giant! I wish reporters would do a little research.) The one interesting thing that was said in the article is that the 'weather' includes iron rain!

[Sea Tyger]

Originally posted by Phantom
The one interesting thing that was said in the article is that the 'weather' includes iron rain!

Now that is cool! I think I'm going to have a planet in my new T20 campaign that is so hot, it has molten iron seas and rain "drops" of small pebbles of iron. Further, I'll make it a RED travel zone, because explorers discovered odd sentient metalloid life forms (killed the whole landing party....Aliens-quality stuff ) and decided it was best such an alien culture was best left alone.

Man, I love being the GM!!

[Chang]

abut a year ago I remeber reading that someone found a system that was indentical in every way with the Vulcan System. I dont remeber where, but I know I did.

[Ergi]

Look at this picture and tell me we are alone in the universe.

http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/arc...003/01/image/a

And that is just a minute proportion of the galaxies surrounding us.

This belongs to the gravitational lensing article.

[Janus]

Ah! To depart from Earth and explore that vast expanse, those shinny kingdoms. One got to envy our descendents.

[tmutant]

Originally posted by Sea Tyger
Now that is cool! I think I'm going to have a planet in my new T20 campaign that is so hot, it has molten iron seas and rain "drops" of small pebbles of iron. Further, I'll make it a RED travel zone, because explorers discovered odd sentient metalloid life forms (killed the whole landing party....Aliens-quality stuff ) and decided it was best such an alien culture was best left alone.

Man, I love being the GM!!

Sea Tyger! Welcome to the Evil Game Masters Support Group. EGMSG is dedicated to helping Evil Game Master reach their full potential. I think we can put you down as a Counselor.