Centauri Dreams now returns to its normal publication schedule, after a brief hold to allow the recent post on the creation of an interstellar foundation to receive maximum visibility. The good ideas that came in both through comments as well as e-mail now go to the founding members of the foundation, and as further news develops, I will publish it here. If you would like to make a suggestion about the name of the foundation, feel free to send it either as a comment on the original post or as an e-mail message to me. But now we move back to research news, and an issue that needs updating. The Pioneeer Anomaly has caught our attention before -- both Pioneer spacecraft seem to be slowing down as they depart our Solar System in ways that challenge conventional theory. The Planetary Society's Pioneer Anomaly Team has launched an effort to recover Pioneer datasets and analyze their contents which has now examined over eleven years of Pioneer 10 data and about four years from Pioneer 11....

Hard on the heels of the recent Hubble photograph of 2003 UB313 comes further news on the size of this increasingly interesting object. While Hubble showed that the newly discovered '10th planet' was only slightly larger than Pluto (and therefore smaller than originally thought), a German team has now provided further data suggesting that the object has a diameter of about 3000 kilometers, roughly 700 kilometers larger than that of Pluto. Measuring distant objects is tricky enough at Pluto's distance, but 2003 UB313 can reach 97 AU at the most distant point in its orbit, almost twice as far as Pluto ever gets from the Sun. To get an accurate reading, astronomers must know something about the reflectivity of the object. But what Frank Bertoldi (University of Bonn and the Max-Planck-Institute for Radioastronomy) and Wilhelm Altenhoff (MPIfR) managed to do was to combine optical observations with heat measurements at a wavelength of 1.2 mm, where reflected sunlight is negligible. The...