Jan 16 1991
From The Space Library
Dr. Sally Heap of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, reported to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Philadelphia that the High Resolution Spectrograph, an advanced instrument on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, made the best spectrograms ever obtained of Melnick 42. Melnick 42, some 80 to 100 times larger than the sun, is a massive star in a galaxy 170,000 light-years from Earth. The star, which is evolving toward a supernova state in the next few million years, is shedding its hot gases at a great rate in a "stellar wind" that strips the star of an amount of gas equal in mass to the sun every 100,000 years. The Hubble Space Telescope also revealed that the activity of pulsars inside a globular star cluster known as M15 was pre-venting the collapse of matter into a black hole and in some cases creating "born-again" pulsars in binary pairs form. (NASA Release 91-8; IVY Times, Jan 17/91; B Sun, Jan 17/91; USA Today, Jan 17/91; P Inq, Jan 17/91; W Post, Jan 17/91; AP, Jan 16/91; LA Times, Jan 17/91; W Times, Jan 18/91; P Inq, Jan 18/91)
NASA showed on closed-circuit television pictures taken by Magellan after it had passed the halfway point in its eight-month mission to photograph Venus. The Magellan flew over 50.9 percent of the planet's surface and made successful pictures of 41.4 percent of the terrain. NASA announced some of the findings regarding the surface of Venus and the effect of tectonics on January 25. (AP, Jan 17/91; NASA Release 91-12; AP, Jan 25/91; NY Times, Jan 26/91; AP, Jan 31/91)
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