Appendices


Element 110 Is Named Darmstadtium

The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics has assigned the name Darmstadium, with symbol Ds, for element 110. Darmstadt, Germany, is the location where this element and many others were created. Physics Today for November 2003 reports that six isotopes of darmstadtium have been created, with half-lives between 180 microseconds and 66 seconds.

Appendix 3C (Extrasolar Planets) links

www.exoplanets.org

Appendix 4 (Planetary Satellite) links

JPL lists of satellite radius, density, albedo
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sat_props.html

JPL lists of satellite orbital properties
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sat_elem.html

Appendix 11 (Elements) links

www.webelements.com

Appendix 12 (Fundamental Particles)

http://www.cpepweb.org

Conversions On Line

See www.onlineconversion.com.

Nearest Stars from CHARA

Todd Henry of CHARA at Georgia State University keeps an updated list of the nearest stars. The list in the appendix of my text is from Harmut Jahreiss, who uses parallaxes from either Hipparcos or the Yale Parallax Catalogue. Henry uses weighted means of the combined values for all objects in a system. Thus the lists differ a bit from that reason as well as from the fact that the CHARA people are finding some additional nearby systems.

The first 13 systems match. Then there are subtle differences. The CHARA group has found the 20th and 55th nearest systems, both red dwarfs in the southern hemisphere.

http://www.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.htm

21st Uranus Moon Not Accepted

January 14

The International Astronomical Union Working Group in charge of naming moons of planets has rejected naming S/1986 U10 since they feel that its existence has not, in the words of Brian Marsden of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, been "sufficiently demonstrated to warrant a permanent number (and name). (Consider, too, that all 12 of the distant Saturnian satellites from 2000 do now qualify because of observations at the following opposition; likewise, 11 of the 12 distant jovian satellites from 1999 and 2000 have a second opposition.)"

Element 118 disappears

Appendix 11 lists element 118, whose discovery was reported at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1999 with a paper in the Physical Review. But the discovery was withdrawn in July 2001 in an embarrassing reversal. The original paper reported the detection of 3 chains of decay to elements 116, then 114, then 112, and so on down to element 106. The chains were thought to reveal the fusion of a krypton atom and a lead atom to make element 118. But reexamination of the data, following failures to produce more of element 118 in the same way, indicated that the chains did not exist. reference: New York Times, July 28, 2001, p. A26. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/28/science/28LAB.html

See the Visual Elements on-line periodic table

Online at: http://www.chemsoc.org/viselements/pages/history.html

New Binary Prefixes Correspond to Metric System

Megabytes aren't really a million bytes, since computers use binary numbers. Since 2^1=1, 2^2=4, 2^3=8, 2^4=16, 2^5=32, 2^6=64, 2^7=128, 2^8=256, 2^9=512, 2^10=1024, and not 1000, new prefixes were voted by the International Electrotechnical Commission, with kibi (instead of kilo) for 10^10, mebi (instead of mega) for 10^20, and gibi (instead of giga) for 2^30.
[Science, 283, 12 March 1999, p. 1631]

Messier objects

Many photographs from the Electronic Universe Project at the University of Oregon.
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/messier.html

Small Bodies of the Solar System

This table was provided by Dan Green of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

REPRESENTATIVE SMALLER BODIES OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM OBJECT ORBITAL CHARACTERISTICS Official IAU Designation/Name Type q Q P i D 1999 KW_4 A 0.20 1.08 0.51 39 1 a 2001 BB_16 A 0.71 1.00 0.79 2 100m a (2062) Aten A 0.79 1.14 0.95 19 1 t (3200) Phaethon A 0.14 2.4 1.4 22 5.2 (1862) Apollo A 0.65 2.3 1.8 6 3 t (5261) Eureka A 1.42 1.6 1.9 20 3 a (1221) Amor A 1.08 2.8 2.7 12 1 a (434) Hungaria A 1.80 2.1 2.7 22 20 a 1994 XM_1 A 0.90 3.1 2.8 6 5m a 2P/Encke C 0.33 4.1 3.28 12 2 t 2000 LK A 0.12 4.5 3.5 18 1 a (4) Vesta A 2.15 2.6 3.6 7 500 t (3) Juno A 1.99 3.4 4.4 13 245 o (2) Pallas A 2.12 3.4 4.6 35 520 o (1) Ceres A 2.56 3.0 4.6 11 910 o 96P/Machholz C 0.12 5.9 5.24 60 4? a 133P = (7968) Elst-Pizarro A/C 2.64 3.7 5.6 1 6 a 22P/Kopff C 1.58 5.3 6.45 5 5? a (153) Hilda A 3.41 4.6 7.9 8 175 a (588) Achilles A 4.42 6.0 11.8 10 150 a (944) Hidalgo A 1.97 9.6 13.9 43 25? a 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann C 5.77 6.3 14.9 9 100? a 1999 LE_31 A 4.31 12.0 23.3 152 12? a (5335) Damocles A 1.58 22.2 41.0 62 9? a 95P = (2060) Chiron C 8.45 19.0 50.8 7 200 t 1P/Halley C 0.59 35.1 76.0 162 11 i (5145) Pholus A 8.7 32.0 91.8 25 150? a 2000 DG_8 A 2.23 19.3 35.4 129 10 a (20461) 1999 LD_31 A 2.39 45.7 118 160 6 a 2000 HE_46 A 2.35 46.0 119 158 5 a 109P/Swift-Tuttle C 0.96 51.3 135 113 3? a (28978) 2001 KX_76 T 29.6 48.9 24qþÏÑ'8Hem“~辌#°³ ")Ö¢˜Sù:}d®¸­IûØ Å–²¥çg2öÓµvî¦;¦óð9r´Ö n*ꄜ¦ˆ@M