Astronomy news from Long Beach is gonna flow all week, and the American Astronomical Society is promising something for Wednesday so cool (”…A likely major newsmaker….”) its press officers won’t even tell reporters in their online promos the topic. I’m guessing a black hole crackling with radio noise that sounds like Elvis is in there – or since this is astronomy and other space news, maybe Judge Crater’s a better bet.

The Tracker will keep eyes open for any particularly outstanding, distinctive (ie not off a press conference), or flubbed stories that merit special remark. But there is too much even to be as un-thorough as usual.

The Tracker is informed that about 70 people are registered to the press room. That includes press officers (p.r. people) from pertinent institutions, plus many working reporters filing mostly online. Just one old-fashioned newspaper reporter is present so far: Joel Achenbach from the Washington Post.   Last time The Tracker went to a AAS meeting, some years back, lots of papers staffed it. One could always get a scoop or two by attending un-promoted sessions, prowling the posters, going to receptions and getting lucky, etc. Several mainstream daily pencil-press and wire reporters are following press conferences and releases on the web, but they won’t be getting too many excloos…(UPDATE! – a few more have trickled in since early Tue, including local man John Johnson from LATimes).

Sampling of stories filed late yesterday and early today, aggregated by news topic, include:

Milky Way Bigger, more Massive, faster-turning than they thought:

• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Data Uncover Bigger Galaxy in Cosmos, and It’s Ours ;
• Scientific American – George Musser : The Milky Weigh Galaxy ; corny hed, but it works. News is that radio wavelength data imply our galaxy has twice the mass as was guesstimated. It now looks like it may out-heft nearby Andromeda. That’d switch the usual rank.
• BBC News : Milky Way ‘bigger than thought‘ ; and may merge with Andromeda sooner too.
• Times (UK) Lewis Smith : Hold on: galaxies may be on collision course ; Actually they already were.
• AP – Seth Borenstein : Milky Way – the galaxy – not snack-sized anymore ; He starts: “Take that, Andromeda!”
• Science News – Ron Cowen: This just in: Milky Way as massive as 3 trillion suns ; He gets in that two of the galaxy’s four arms are hatching most of the newest generation of stars.
• Wired News – Alexis Madrigal : Milky Way 50 Percent Larger, Astronomers Discover ; He includes another snappy new image, of Cassiopeia A and surroundings near the galaxy’s starry core.
• Science News – Ron Cowen – Core of Galaxy in High-Res ;
• Wash. Post (blog) Joel Achenbach: Many, many stars ;
• Grist: Harvard-Smithsonian Press Release ; NRAO Press Release ;

Miscellaneous, mostly planets:

• Bad Astronomy (blog, via Discover Mag site) Phil Plait : AAS#!: Zombie stars and planets kicked out of the crib ; A pro’s take, focussed on odder tidbits.
• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland : Alien asteroid dust hints at Earth-like planets ;
• Wired Science – Clara Moskowitz : Habitable Exoplanets Could Be Common in Our Galaxy ;
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson : Dead stars harbor asteroids ;
• Grist: NASA-JPL Press Release (on white dwarfs, planet hints) ;

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.