Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Although astronomers only slowly came to realize dark matter’s importance in the universe, for me personally it happened in an instant. In my first project as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978, I measured the rotational velocities of star-forming giant molecular clouds in the outer part of the disk of our Milky Way galaxy.

Working together with other UH Manoa colleagues on the Belle experiment at the KEKB factory in Tsukuba, Japan, postdoctoral researcher Himansu Sahoo first reported the first observation of a new type of rare "penguin decay" of the beauty quark and measured its matter-antimatter symmetry violation parameters.

As long as the weather cooperates, Friday will mark the end of an era for the astronomy world, as NASA sends up its final manned spacecraft. However, odds are against the weather being trouble-free.

Photograph by Chris Floyd FORGET BLUE skies -- for a growing community of stargazing tourists, darkness is all they want. "People have never seen the Milky Way," says Rowena Davis of the International Dark-Sky Association, which identifies the earth's best locales for appreciating the heavens