Quasars and a Dwarf Star Break the Rules in Tucson

摘要

Earlier this month, more than 2000 astronomers convened in Tucson, Arizona, for the American Astronomical Society's largest meeting ever. Even the war drums beaten by a few local Apaches and their supporters, protesting a University of Arizona telescope project, could not drown out lecture-hall and corridor discussions of topics such as naked quasars, flaring stars, and planetary searches. At a press briefing at Tucson, John Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey,noted that colleagues jokingly attribute his success as an astronomer to a series of spectacular failures. Bahcall, for instance, is a leading authority on the "solar neutrino problem"--researchers' failure to find a good half of the neutrinos that theory predicts should be streaming from the sun. And just a few months ago, Bahcall led a team that failed to find as many dim red stars as some theorists had predicted, apparently eliminating the most conventional explanation for the mysterious dark matterthat is thought to permeate our galaxy's outer regions.