This month's meeting be on the SRSU campus in the Warnock Science Bldg. Room 101 on Wednesday, 10 January at 7:30 p.m. Chuck Dobbins will be presenting an update on program he  previously did on Exo-planets.
          All members are receiving a hard copy of this newsletter since Speed Express has ended local services in the area. The Society web site has been hosted at no cost beginning many years ago with Brooksdata. Free hosting was continued after the buy-outs of by Overland, Wireless Frontier, and until December, Speed Express. There is no local hosting service that the web master is aware of. Read more below regarding dealing with the current web site issue.
          No meeting minutes or treasurer's report are contained in this issue. However, there was a meeting of the  officers in December. After reviewing the budget for 2007, there are some  necessary adjustments to the club's spending if this organization is to continue at the recent level of membership, which has been hovering around a dozen for a few years. Raising dues was not discussed. Two reductions in spending are proposed:

•   Discontinuing Insurance on the Murray Newman telescope - $118
•   Discontinuing liability insurance coverage - $327

•   Seek out possible free web site hosting
•   Purchase commercial web site hosting - $47.40 per year

          Stellar mass black holes have been discovered, and astronomers now believe that supermassive black holes exist at the centres of most galaxies. But now a black hole has been discovered inside a globular star cluster. This could be one of the elusive "intermediate-mass" black holes.
          Globular clusters contain thousands, or even millions of stars, and astronomers never thought they could hold a black hole. Computer simulations predicted that a black hole that formed in the cluster would sink into the centre of the cluster, but then inevitably get slung out into space after gravitational interaction with the stars in the cluster.
          This new black hole was found by ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, which was able to spot the tell-tale X-ray signature of a black hole. Well, the black hole itself is dark, but superheated matter surrounding the black hole gives off a tremendous amount of energy before it's swallowed up.
          The black hole is located inside a globular cluster in the relatively nearby elliptical galaxy NGC 4472, located about 50 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster.
          It's possible that it gained mass by merging with other black holes, and consuming enough material that it could lock its position inside the middle of the galaxy, sort of like a mini-supermassive black hole. With enough mass, the stars in the cluster just wouldn't able to eject it.

          To see any distance in space, you need some kind of telescope. We've got some pretty powerful ones here on Earth, but nature has us beat with gravitational lenses. This is a phenomenon when a relatively nearby object passes directly between us and a more distant object. The gravity from the nearby object acts as like a telescope lens to bend light and magnify the more distant object.
           Until now, these gravitational lens have been single stars or distant galaxies, but now a new class of lens is being called into service: entire groups of galaxies. The research is being done as part of the Canada-France-Hawaii Legacy Survey. which will devote 500 nights of telescope time over the next 5 years. They intend to view approximately 1% of the visible sky from their perch in Hawaii.
          The survey is about 25% right now, but the team has already turned up several gravitational lensing arcs around galaxy groups. These arcs are highly magnified distant galaxies, which allow scientists to study their light. This survey will allow astronomers to make direct observations, and chart the formation of these structures in the early Universe. They also hope to understand the role of dark matter in their evolution. 

          Multiple star systems are a staple of science fiction. The heroes stumble across a parched desert searching for some escape from the three suns burning in the sky. As they struggle for their lives, perhaps our protagonists might take a moment to consider the chain of astronomical events that brought them to this moment.
          Astronomers can offer some clues. Researchers working with the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have imaged several of these multiple star systems still in the early stages of formation. There are a few competing theories at work right now:

•    protostars and their surrounding disks fragment from a larger parent disk, or
•    the protostars form separately, and then the capture each other into a mutual orbit