Exocomets may be as common as exoplanets

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Thousands of potential exoplanets and many stars with massive disks of gas and dust that suggest planets are forming have been found. However, not much of the stuff intermediate between dust and planets, such as asteroids, planetesimals and comets have been detected. UC Berkeley and SSL astronomer Barry Welsh has looked closely at a number of stars with dust disks and found evidence that they also have comets. Read more.

Clusters of Galaxies And The Constituents of Material In And Around Clusters of Galaxies

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Richard Lieu, Dept. of Physics, University of Alabama in Huntsville

SSL Addition Conference Room at 3pm Tuesday December 18th

Since the mid 1990’s it has been increasingly apparent that material in and around clusters of  galaxies is multi-phased, consisting of dark matter and hot, virialized X-ray emitting gas, and also cooler gases and possibly non-thermal particles. The early evidence for the latter two components was from  EUV and soft X-ray observations from which it was inferred that a warm gas component lies predominantly at the outskirts of the cluster while relativistic particles may exist in the inner parts. Continue reading →

FOXSI sounding rocket launch

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On Friday November 2nd, an SSL sounding rocket had a successful flight from the White Sands Missile Range.  The Focusing Optics X-ray Solar Imager (FOXSI) payload observed the Sun for six minutes before landing safely and intact in the New Mexico desert.  FOXSI carried focusing X-ray optics and silicon strip detectors and successfully imaged solar X-rays during its flight.  After some upgrades, FOXSI will fly again in two years.