Assorted astronomical novelties

A Very High Energy (VHE) gamma ray sky survey of the Milky Way's disk taken by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) reveals 2 Dark Accelerators, objects emitting VHE gamma rays, but no light in the lower energy wavelengths.

The Andromeda Galaxy, our closest big neighbor extends three times further than previously thought. I should get the original paper to see if the mass estimates have been revised upwards. Will this result obtain for all galaxies?

Voyager 1 is nearing the edge of the solar system. Of course, no one knows exactly what "edge" means.

The Carina Nebula's full of a a lot of young stars, some of them up to 100 Sols. The Spitzer people seem to be promoting this as the new Pillars of Creation/Fingers of God picture. Coming soon to a t-shirt near you? Coincidence of the day: Dennis Overbye. Mentioned on the audiobook version of A Short History of Everything I started listening to today; wrote the NY Times article on Carina.

Allen's SETI-scape of scopes ($31 million cheap) is starting to wake up. It should be able to look for more signals in a year than what's been sampled in the last 45 years. Is SETI @ Home going to have enough juice? (Is it even jacked into it?)

Probably the coolest news for amateur astronomers is that a couple of our own helped to find a new extra-solar planet. The method uses microlensing, and the amateurs used equipment well within the reach of the typical backyard hobbiest (who admitedly spends much more than a spouse will ever overlook.) Evidently, there are a lot more out there. Is there a registry of known microlenses? The distances involved suggest this might work for objects in the SMC. Might it work at larger distances? The gravitational lensing effect has been used for quasars and distant galaxies; have any been used to analyze the light from supernovea at cosmological distances?