From the RAS Image Collection

News Inspired youngster names asteroid Library News (101955) Bennu. Bennu is an ancient Egyptian bird god, usually drawn as a grey heron, and one of the symbols of Osiris. Puzio said that the shape of the satellite, especially the arm of the Touch-and-Go Sample Mechanism (TAGSAM) and the wings of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft made him think of a heron, with its long neck. The judging team liked the Egyptian link and the parallel with the shape of the spacecraft. The god Bennu also had links with the ancient Egyptian gods Atum, the primeval deity, and Re, the Sun god; Bennu the asteroid is thought to be a primeval body close in composition to the Sun. http://bit.ly/18vUauD The e-MERLIN radio image of Betelgeuse with the visual size of the star overlaid as a black circle, diameter 45  milliarcsec. (Univ. Manchester) e-MERLIN eyes up Betelgeuse The e-MERLIN radio telescope array has produced this image of hot spots in the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse, a red supergiant 650 light-years from Earth. Betelgeuse is 1000 times bigger than Earth and its atmosphere extends out to five times that size. This new image reveals two hot spots within the outer atmosphere and a faint arc of cool gas even further out. The hot spots are on opposite sides of the star, and e-MERLIN measurements show that they are much hotter than the rest of the star’s surface. The arc of cool gas lies almost 7.4 billion kilometres away from the star – about 50 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun, and has mass almost two-thirds that of the Earth. These detailed images are important for both the evolution of Betelgeuse and for understanding how the elements produced in giant stars move into the interstellar medium. The research is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by lead author Dr Anita Richards, from the University of Manchester. “This is the first direct image showing hot spots so far from the centre of the star,” A&G • June 2013 • Vol. 54  said Richards. “We are continuing radio and microwave observations to help decide which mechanisms are most important in driving the stellar wind and producing these hot spots. This won’t just tell us how the elements that form the building blocks of life are being returned to space, it will also help determine how long it is before Betelgeuse explodes as a supernova.” She also highlighted the problem of why the hot spots are so hot – about 4500 K, compared to the average temperature of the radio surface of the star, about 1200 K and the visual surface, at 3600 K. “One possibility is that shock waves, caused either by the star pulsating or by convection in its outer layers, are compressing and heating the gas. Another is that the outer atmosphere is patchy and we are seeing through to hotter regions within. The arc of cool gas is thought to be the result of a period of increased mass loss from the star at some point in the last century but its relationship to structures like the hot spots, which lie much closer in, within the star’s outer atmosphere, is unknown.” From the RAS Image Collection This beautiful hand-coloured frontispiece is from Euclid’s Preclarissimus liber elementorum (Elements of Geometry), printed in 1482 in Venice. It is one of hundreds of images from the Society’s Library and archive charting the history of astronomy and geophysics – including portraits, rare books, observatories, telescopes and observational drawings – that are available to view online via the Science Photo Library. The SPL and the RAS Librarian are adding more images from the Society’s outstanding collection of early printed books. To see the collection available online, go to the Science Photo Library webpages (http://www.sciencephoto.com/collections/images), and select “Royal Astronomical Society” from the left-hand menu. The SPL acts as the agent for the Society in supplying images for commercial use. However, the Society retains the rights to all its images and the Library can supply Fellows with any of them in digital format for non-commercial purposes such as lectures and talks. Please contact the Librarian Jenny Higham at for more information. New books received Recent acquisitions and donations to the RAS Library include: ●  Madsen C 2012 The Jewel on the Mountaintop: Fifty Years of the European Southern Observatory (Wiley-VCh) QB 82 European ●  Heck A (ed.) 2012 Organizations, People and Strategies in Astronomy (OPSA) (Venngeist, Duttlenheim, France) (donated by Prof. Dr André Heck) QB 51 HEC ●  Sellers D 2012 In Search of William Gascoigne: Seventeenth Century Astronomer (Springer, New York) (Astrophysics and Space Science Library, 390) QB 36 Gascoigne ●  Taylor S R 2012 Destiny or Chance Revisited: Planets and their Place in the Cosmos (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) QB 501 TAY http://bit.ly/173WSIp 3.7 The asteroid that will be the target of the OSIRIS-REx sample-return mission now has a more memorable name – Bennu – suggested by a 9-year-old in a competition. OSIRIS-REx is an international mission led by the University of Arizona and NASA, whose target had gone by the name of (101955) 1999 RQ36. After a competition sponsored by the mission team, the Planetary Society and the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the name suggested by 9-year-old Michael Toler Puzio from North Carolina was approved by the International Astronomical Union. The target is now formally known as  (...truncated)