Introduction For astronomy 1993 was a year of discovery but also one of bitter disappointment. The U.S.

Mars Observer spacecraft, eagerly anticipated for its ability to make the first close-up observations of Mars in 17 years, suddenly fell silent on August 21, three days before it was to go into orbit around the planet. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) produced many new optical images of astronomical objects but was plagued by problems with pointing, power, and a flawed primary mirror. At year's end space shuttle astronauts successfully completed the most elaborate repair mission in the history of the U.S. space program to fix the telescope, although the results of their work would take weeks to evaluate. On the positive side, observations from several spacecraft provided insights into a variety of phenomena, and to cap the year two American astronomers from Princeton University, Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor (see NOBEL PRIZES), were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery and subsequent study of a binary pulsar, a rapidly spinning neutron star in orbit with another star around a common centre of gravity.

Solar System. Although the solar system is dominated by the Sun and major planets, some of the more exciting revelations of 1993 involved comets and asteroids. In March a spectacular comet was discovered by Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker of the U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Ariz., and David H. Levy of the University of Arizona. The most unusual feature about Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was that it looked like a string of glowing pearls. An HST photograph revealed about 20 cometary chunks spread out in a line. Calculations suggested that the comet's nucleus broke up after a near collision with the giant planet Jupiter in July 1992 and predicted that the pieces would plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere about July 20, 1994, unleashing an energy equivalent to roughly 100 million megatons of TNT. In 1991, as the Galileo spacecraft passed near the asteroid Gaspra en route to Jupiter, it snapped the first close-up picture of an asteroid. In August 1993 Galileo passed and imaged a second asteroid, 243 Ida. An elongated object about 52 km (32 mi) across, Ida is heavily cratered, suggesting it is at least a billion years old. While passing Ida, Galileo's onboard magnetometer detected shifts in the direction of the magnetic field of the local solar wind. Since the solar wind consists of electrically charged particles blowing

away from the Sun and dragging the magnetic field along with it, the measurements suggested that Ida possesses its own magnetic field, which distorts the solar wind field. Where do comets come from? For years astronomers have postulated a comet storehouse beyond the orbit of Pluto. According to theory, objects lying in this socalled Kuiper belt would occasionally be perturbed by encounters with nearby stars, thereby hurtling fresh comets into the inner solar system. In 1992 David Jewitt of the University of Hawaii and Jane X. Luu of the University of California at Berkeley discovered an object, designated 1992 QB1, that seemed to be part of this belt. In early 1993 the two astronomers reported a second body, dubbed 1993 FW, lying at what may be the belt's inner edge. By October four more objects had been spotted, although these appeared to lie somewhat closer in, just outside Neptune's orbit. It may be that the latter objects are comets that have left the belt and are moving inward toward the Sun; alternately, they may be asteroids having permanent residence near Neptune.

Stars. In the early 1970s the first gamma-ray observatory satellite, SAS-2, detected a bright gamma-ray source

with no obvious optical counterpart. Its discoverers called the object Geminga (Milanese Italian dialect for "it's not there"), but its nature remained a mystery until 1992 when detection of periodic X-ray and gamma-ray emission suggested that Geminga is a pulsar. In February, Italian astronomer Giovanni Bignami and coworkers reported that they had measured the proper motion of the object, from which they concluded that Geminga was the nearest pulsar to Earth detected to date. Their observations also supported the optical identification of Geminga with a very dim (25thmagnitude) star. Because of its rather young age of about 350,000 years and its close distance of about 300 light-years, astronomers speculated that Geminga may have had an effect on Earth when the pulsar formed in a supernova explosion. The solar system lies in a hot, rarefied region of interstellar space called the Local Bubble. The supernova that produced Geminga may have heated and thinned out matter in Earth's local region to form the bubble. The enigmatic events called gamma-ray bursts were also first detected in the early 1970s. Unlike most astronomical phenomena, these bursts, which last a few seconds or less, have never been associated with any known type of object. Nonetheless, it was widely hypothesized that the events are somehow produced by neutron stars in the Milky Way. During the year the

Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE) aboard the Earth-orbiting Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (GRO) steadily detected such events, with more than 700 bursts reported by late 1993. From GRO data it appeared that there are really two classes of burst: those lasting only tenths of a second and those lasting tens or hundreds of seconds. One event on January 31 (dubbed the Super Bowl burst for its coincidence with the football event) was, while it lasted, 100 times brighter than Geminga. Although there was still no definitive identification of any gamma-ray burst with a star, quasar, or other known object, the distribution of the events over the sky is telling. Because their arrival directions are spread evenly over the sky, unlike the distribution of stars in the galaxy in which the Earth is immersed, gamma-ray bursts seem likely to come from outside the Milky Way.

Galaxies and Cosmology. Whether the observed expansion of the universe may someday stop, to be followed by a collapse, depends on the mass density of the universe. With a sufficiently high density the "closed" universe has enough gravitational pull to overcome the expansion. But the amount of matter seen in the form of visible stars, gas,

and galaxies is insufficient to close the universe. Nonetheless, many astronomers believe that the universe is closed and have been searching for the socalled dark matter that would confirm their belief. The year saw its share of proposed "sightings" of dark matter. Early on came the announcement of the detection of dark matter in a nearby group of galaxies called the NGC 2300 group. The result was derived from the detection of X-rays from this galaxy cluster by the Rntgensatellit (ROSAT) orbiting observatory. What ROSAT saw was an X-ray glow from the region around NGC 2300, presumably emitted by hot gas filling the local intergalactic space. The ROSAT team concluded that to hold the detected hot gas within the cluster, more mass than is present in the visible galaxies is required. The team reported that if the inferred dark matter also exists in other similar groups of galaxies, it would provide enough mass to close the universe. Several groups reported the detection of MACHOs (massive compact halo objects) lying within the outer reaches of the Milky Way. Astronomers believe that a halo consisting mainly of dark matter surrounds the Milky Way. It was proposed that if the halo consists of numerous small starlike objects, each too dim to be seen directly, their presence could be detected indirectly by their effects on the light from more distant visible stars. According to Einstein's general theory of

relativity, a mass will act as a lens and bend light that passes through its gravitational field. Thus, light from a more distant star would brighten and dim if a dim foreground MACHO were to pass in front of it. In 1993 a U.S.-Australian team reported detecting the predicted telltale stellar light variations. After monitoring roughly two million stars in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud Galaxy, the team found a star that became brighter and then dimmer over a period of about a month. By year's end three more reports of such MACHO events had appeared. The nature of the unseen objects remained elusive, although candidates included brown dwarfs, red dwarf stars, and white dwarf stars. Even though the amount of matter represented by the reported MACHOs, if extrapolated to other galaxies, was insufficient to close the universe, the observational technique did open a new channel for detecting dark matter in the universe. (See PHYSICS.) (KENNETH BRECHER) -By Samip Dahal.