Engineers will soon install the first piece of  the GLAST Burst Monitor into the  Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST), bringing the project another step closer to launch. Currently, it is scheduled to lift-off in little over a year.

GLAST will study the gamma ray bursts (GRBs) resulting when two neutron stars merger or a large star collapses. "GLAST will...open up a new window in the high energy range," says Charles Meegan, principal investigator of the GLAST Burst Monitor at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

GRBs are just about the most distant phenomena scientists are able to observe. GLAST will need to meet some challenging goals that could rewrite the rules of physics. It will be able to study whether all light travels at the same speed in a vacuum. GLAST team members also hope to study how GRBs occur. "There hasn't really been a satisfactory explanation of the physics that goes on to get all this high energy radiation out in such a short amount of time," says Meegan. "We're hoping that measurements over a wider spectrum will contribute to the solution."

The mission may also test a theory that attempts to unify the laws of physics. Known as the "Unified Field Theory," proposes the existence of a fourth spatial dimension.

GLAST be launched aboard a Delta 2 Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral Air in September 2007. The mission is designed to last five years, but the team hopes they can squeeze up to ten years out of the device.

Aside from the eighth grade social studies student who thought "Seti" was an ancient Egyptian deity, many people have strange ideas about just what the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence actually is, or what it does.

Some folks think its a "National Agency." This was promulgated by  a line in the movie Starman, in which a government official flashes a badge and announces "I'm from SETI."  Never let it be said that Hollywood lets facts stand in the way of a good movie.

The reality is that SETI is a field of research, carried on by a group of 30 scientists from several different countries. There is a SETI Institute - but no "National SETI Agency."

Another misconception is the idea that this is the primary purpose of radio telescopes. In fact, while SETI does make occasional use of these, these radio arrays spend 95% of the time observing quasars and other celestial phenomena.

The third misconception has to do with the length of time that SETI has been on the job. A common argument by politicians (not the best nor the brightest of people) wielding budget axes runs like this: "SETI has been listening for nearly fifty years and hasn’t discovered ET, so SETI is a failure."

As with many other issues, politicians making this statement demonstrate their ignorance about what SETI is and how it actually works. While SETI actually did go on-line in 1960, the search for alien intelligence has not been continuous over intervening decades. In fact, during the first twenty years, the twenty-three targeted SETI projects comprised a total of three months of actual search time.

It should also be noted that a "radio telescope" is not like your AM/FM Radio. It is an extremely precision, directionally-sensitive instrument, searching one ten-millionth of the sky at any given time, and over a very limited spectrum, running from 1GHz to 10 GHz containing about nine billion channels. Each sky position requires at least 90 observations to cover all of that "real estate."

One last point: not all SETI projects are given equal priority. To date, only two SETI projects have done any significant searching at all. (It's a big universe out there....)

Supernova hunters are boggled by the mysterious object they spotted back in February in the constellation Bootes. At the time, it resembled an ordinary supernova, but since then it's evolved into a much brighter object with an abnormal spectrum.

Discovered by Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Survey, the enigmatic object took at least 100 days to reach its peak brightness, a strange occurrence as a normal supernova usually reaches its brightness peak about 20 days after the blast.

The object's unusual spectrum also baffled researchers who couldn't find any matches in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Its colour is unchanged since it was first spotted. Another deviation from the normal supernova-forming process, as temperature changes after an explosion cause changes in color.

Even the distance of the object has not been determined, though its pair of calcium absorption lines indicates that its red shift would be 0.54, which translates to a distance of 5.5 billion light years. According to Kyle Dawson of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a member of the Supernova Cosmology Project, the object is at least one magnitude brighter than a Type 1A supernova would be at that distance. Furthermore there's no sign of a host galaxy, which should've been visible.

Stefan Immler of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center is not ruling out the possibility that it might be a supernova, though he calls it "a very intriguing object".

Dawson can only speculate, "It could be some galactic variable [star], a supernova or a quasar." But none of those makes any sense. Puzzling as the object may be, Dawson and his team have booked June 25 for another round of observations. "It's still going to be visible for another 2.5 months on the ground. We hope the spectrum will evolve and we see some features we can recognize."

The galaxy known as Andromeda is situated some 2.5 million light-years from our location, riding like a majestic counterweight to the Milky Way (which it is believed to resemble) on the other end of the Local Group.

This spectacular infra-red photo was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, a composite of over 3,000 individual frames. In this image, interstellar gas appears red, while older stars show up in blue. Young stars located in the galaxy's spiral arms are clear in the visible light spectrum, but when the infra-red filter is added, trails of dust lead back toward the core.

The purpose behind this image was to  explore Andromeda's infra-red brightness and determine the nature of its stellar population. Although as a "spiral"-type galaxy, Andromeda - with around one trillion stars - is well over twice the size of the Milky Way.