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What? Me worry? A ringtail cat, captured after having a little too much fun at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, awaits release. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

It seems the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has been experiencing close encounters of the furred kind. Beginning in 2008, scientists noticed that a strange being—or beings—began paying repeat visits to the building that houses the MEarth project—a collective of eight robotic telescopes designed to search for distant planets—and eventually defaced the equipment. When paying a visit to the facility to shoot an episode of NOVA ScienceNOW, host Neil deGrasse Tyson remarked on the mysterious paw prints gracing MEarth.

Enough was enough. This thing had to be caught and, after rigging a live trap, the vandal was revealed to be a ring-tailed cat. A raccoon relative, the cat had likely entered the facility in search of an insect-centric meal. The animal was released at a spring some distance away from the mountaintop observatory. (Another ringtail cat was also trapped and released elsewhere, while a third has been observed at the nearby Whipple Observatory Base Camp. You can see some of this third visitor’s shenanigans here on YouTube.) In spite of the mild trouble they’ve caused, these creatures have endeared themselves to some of the staffers. “We’re considering making the ringtail cat the unofficial mascot of the MEarth project,” said project leader David Charbonneau. “With those big eyes, they’ve certainly got the night vision to be natural-born astronomers!”

Donkeys carrying people and supplies to construct the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in 1909 at Mount Whitney, California. Photograph courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives

A convergence of rather significant, albeit obscure, anniversaries are at hand. One being the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s demonstration of the telescope, which took place on Tuesday of this week and the other is today’s 100th anniversary of the completion a stone hut that Smithsonian astronomers built on the top of California’s Mount Whitney in 1909.

The stone hut now serves as a shelter for weary climbers who summit the 14,502-foot-high mountain located in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. But 100 years ago, before rocketry afforded space telescopes, the tiny astronomical outpost represented the pinnacle of scientific endeavors. The hope was that from observations made here, high enough to escape much of Earth’s atmosphere, the researchers would be able to detect the existence of water, if not life, on Mars.

So donkeys carrying heavy loads of people and supplies were coaxed up the steep, rocky mountain trail and the little three-room hut, measuring 11 by 30 feet, was painstakingly erected within about four weeks. Wrote one observer: “The structure is composed of stone, cement, steel and glass, with not a stick of wood in it.”

The hut was immediately equipped with a telescope, just as Galileo had done 300 years earlier. “Our instruments consisted of a sixteen-inch horizontal reflecting telescope and a suitable spectroscope connected with it. It was necessary to protect all parts from the wind, and a canvas shelter was constructed to enclose the instruments,” the expedition leader wrote.

Stormy weather had made the journey up the mountain long and difficult and of the seven nights that the expedition remained at the top in the bitter cold, only two nights were clear enough for observations. But the scientists remained hopeful. Their method was to compare the spectrum of the moon, which they knew had no water, to that of Mars. “We are now in a position to issue the strongest statement that has ever been issued as to the existence of water vapor on Mars.” (Scientists only recently confirmed water in the form of ice at the planet’s poles, and say that water is trapped under the surface—either as ice or liquid.)

Mt. Whitney Hut. Courtesy of Flickr user American Sherpa

In 1977, the Mount Whitney Smithsonian Institution Shelter was listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Today, the hut is no longer a Smithsonian outpost. Instead, it keeps lonely vigil there at the top of the continental United States’ highest elevation point. Wrote one climber who recently spent the night in the hut: “The wind whistled throughout the inside of the shelter all night, and time went by very slowly.”

As for anniversaries, more are certain to come. In 1909, the director of the Lick Observatory told the New York Times that the hut “should last 500 years.”

(A celebration of the Mount Whitney Hut’s anniversary is planned for Thursday at 10 a.m. at the Whitney Portal Day Use Area, located 13 miles west of Lone Pine at the end of Whitney Portal Road. Park officials warn that parking is limited and recommend carpooling.)

Click photo to view the 24-hour video Webcast (download time depends on connection speed).

Happy International Year of Astronomy! And how’s this for a celebration: A live 24-hour video Webcast called “Around the World in 80 Telescopes,” a digital travel around (and off) the globe to find out what’s happening at research observatories. The Webcast began last night and will continue through April 4th.

The Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics will have three of its facilities featured. The Submillimeter Array (see video above) in Hawaii, the Magellan Telescopes, (tonight, 11:00 p.m. EDT) in Chile, and the MMT Observatory (tomorrow, 2:50 a.m. EDT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Artist's conception of the Milky Way using new measurements. Courtesy of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

The Milky Way galaxy, Earth’s ride through space, is more mini-van than mini-Cooper, report scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting this week. New technology allowing them to make high-precision measurements showed that not only is the Milky Way moving 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously thought, it is also 50 percent larger.

To make sense of the news, I spoke with Mark Reid, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who contributed to this research.

Q: What does the new calculation of a faster spinning galaxy mean for us?

A: Nothing. We wouldn’t notice the difference at all. If we lived billions of years, then we would certainly see that all the constellations and the patterns in the Milky Way would change a little faster but we’re not going to notice that.

Q: How does it impact us then?

The Milky Way galaxy now has the same rotation speed with the Andromeda Galaxy, our neighbor. That means it’s as massive as the Andromeda Galaxy and there’s a lot of ramifications for the evolution of the galaxies around us. For example, the Milky Way and Andromeda are the two biggest galaxies in what we call the Local Group, this little neck of the woods of the universe. There’s a good chance that these two galaxies will hit each other in about five billion years or so. Now, by realizing that there’s more mass in the Milky Way than we thought, [this discovery] makes this more likely and that it will happen a bit sooner because there’s more gravity pulling them together.

Q: What happens when two galaxies collide?

A: If you’re sitting here on the Earth, you would never know it because there’s so much empty space between all the stars. If we have two populations of stars merging through each other, they won’t collide or things like that. But what will happen is the Milky Way and the other galaxy Andromeda will change dramatically. They might merge into one galaxy for example. So over very long time periods the entire sky would change. In fact, it’s possible that the sun and Earth could get ejected out of the galaxy in such a collision. That’s a distinct possibility. It wouldn’t affect life here, but it would certainly affect what we see when we look out into the universe.

For more on this story, see reporting done by The New York Times, Wired, and Discover.

A black hole that trumps all others in size was detected by two NASA satellites and announced by researchers, led by Andrea Prestwich at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The black hole is a hefty 24 to 33 times larger than the Sun (the previous best was 16 times larger).

Sitting 1.8 million light years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, this new record-breaker is a black hole of the stellar-mass variety, meaning it was formed when a massive star died and collapsed inward upon itself.

The team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was able to estimate the black hole’s mass because it orbits another star that ejects gas, which spirals toward the black hole (above), heats up and emits revealing X-rays before being gobbled up by the hole.

Some suspected that the black hole bulked up as a result of an insatiable appetite, slurping up whatever was within its vicinity. But the study found that it has only gained one or two solar masses since its metamorphosis from star to black hole. Instead of shedding pounds, as most stars do before imploding, this one carried its mass into its black hole afterlife. Experts say the black hole was “born fat, it didn’t grow fat.”

The finding expands researchers’ understanding of just how massive a black hole can be. “We now know that black holes that form from dying stars can be much larger than we had realized,” Prestwich says.

(This artist’s conception shows the biggest stellar-mass black hole, upper left, which weighs 24 to 33 times as much as the Sun. It is pulling gas from a companion Wolf-Rayet star lower right. Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA.)

J. Allen Hynek got the call at 6:30 p.m., October 4, 1957.

The associate director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, near Boston, hung up and told a colleague: “There’s a Russian satellite up.”

Sputnik’s launch shocked the public: scientists were surprised only that the Russians did it first—earlier that year, researchers worldwide had agreed their countries would send up satellites to study the planet. In anticipation, observatory director Fred Whipple had summoned amateur astronomers—to be called Moonwatchers—to track any satellites. After Sputnik, 83 teams in 20 countries (above, in Pretoria, South Africa) rushed to their posts. By 1959, some 230 teams were tracking two dozen satellites; the teams’ data led to an accurate measure of the Earth’s size and shape.

Cameras replaced the Moonwatchers by 1975. Hynek, who died in 1986, went on to study UFOs. In 1972 he coined the phrase “close encounters of the third kind.”

(Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives, image #96-960)