Two years of collaboration between researchers from Taiwan, the US and South Korea recently found that the outer Solar System might not be as crowded as astronomers thought.
The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) — a cooperation project between Academia Sinica’s Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, National Central University’s (NCU) Institute of Astronomy and Yonsei University in South Korea — observed orbiting objects in the Kuiper Belt, the region beyond Neptune, since 2005, NCU said in a press release yesterday.
The research targeted objects — mostly chunks of rocks or ice — between 3km and 28km in diameter by recording the luminosity of stars as the objects passed and occluded them, NCU said.
The method made TAOS the only research team in the world that could probe these objects, as they were too small to be seen directly through a telescope, the school said.
“We were able to observe the outer Solar System ... These objects were very small, only larger than an ordinary track field,” NCU professor of astrology Chen Wen-ping (陳文屏) said.
Analysis of some 7 billion bits of data collected by the project over the past two years showed that no occultation was recorded, NCU said.
NCU vice chancellor Ip Wing-huen (葉永烜), a noted astronomer in Taiwan, said the research team estimated there were between 10 times to 100 times less orbiting objects in the Kuiper Belt than astronomers had previously estimated.
The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters last Wednesday.
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm early yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, less than a week after a typhoon barreled across the nation. The agency issued an advisory at 3:30am stating that the 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, of the Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, with a 100km radius. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA
Residents have called on the Taipei City Government to reconsider its plan to demolish a four-decades-old pedestrian overpass near Daan Forest Park. The 42-year-old concrete and steel structure that serves as an elevated walkway over the intersection of Heping and Xinsheng roads is to be closed on Tuesday in preparation for demolition slated for completion by the end of the month. However, in recent days some local residents have been protesting the planned destruction of the intersection overpass that is rendered more poetically as “sky bridge” in Chinese. “This bridge carries the community’s collective memory,” said a man surnamed Chuang
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm earlier today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, in this year's Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am, the CWA said. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) with a 100km radius, it said. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA meteorologist Huang En-hung (黃恩宏) said. However, a more accurate forecast would be made on Wednesday, when Yinxing is
NEW DESTINATIONS: Marketing campaigns to attract foreign travelers have to change from the usual promotions about Alishan and Taroko Gorge, the transport minister said The number of international tourists visiting Taiwan is estimated to top 8 million by the end of this year, Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shi-kai (陳世凱) said yesterday, adding that the ministry has not changed its goal of attracting 10 million foreign travelers this year. Chen made the remarks at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee to brief lawmakers about the ministry’s plan to boost foreign visitor arrivals. Last month, Chen told the committee that the nation might attract only 7.5 million tourists from overseas this year and that when the ministry sets next year’s goal, it would not include
RSS