Free copies of the Democrat and Chronicle and The New York Times will be available for students to borrow in Wilson Commons, and then return for other students to read as well.
“We are doing this on a trial basis,” Projects and Services Committee member and sophomore Hannah Geswein said. “The idea was suggested by [Class of 2005 graduate] Tom Hayes at the end of last year because a lot of schools in our area already have programs like this.”
The money for the newspapers will be coming from a percentage of the sale of Student Advantage cards.
Students are excited about this new program and plan on taking advantage of it.
“Free newspapers keep me in contact with the outside world a little more,” sophomore Grant Dauber said. “It makes it easier to stay aware of what is going on.”
Many students agree with Dauber that it helps them stay aware of news outside of UR.
“Being in the UR bubble, it is hard to know what’s going all the time,” sophomore Dylan Sallerson said.
ITS glitch posts false election results
On The Hive Web site, election results were posted Wednesday night for the 2009 class council and senate elections and at-large senator elections. The polls were not scheduled to open yet.
“This is probably just a technical problem,” Speaker of the Senate David Ladon said. “The results are not valid.”
Ladon assures that this problem will be fixed today and cites an Information Technology Services Center for the problem.
“Baby planets” discovered by UR scientists
A team of scientists, led by UR astronomers, recently found in a gap in the rings of dust around two gas-enshrouded stars in the Taurus population – GM Aurigae and DM Tauri.
“The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched into orbit in 2003, and the team was assembled a couple of years before that,” Professor of Physics and Astronomy William Forrest said. “We picked out these two well-known stars because they were particularly interesting cases.”
Forrest suggests that the large gap in the dust-ring around the young stars can only be attributed to the formation of giant gas planets, such as Jupiter.
“Ninty-eight percent of Jupiter is hydrogen and gas,” Forrest said. “It is much easier to accumulate the core of the planet with ice. In fact, big planets like Jupiter are found in ice-zones. However, the accumulation of such mass to form the first solid core takes as much as 5 million years.”
While suggesting the mechanism of the planet formation, Forrest proposes that the fast growth was due to a gravitational sweeping of the dust.
“The key to forming the planet is the density enhancement to form the core,” Forrest said.
Although the planet hasn’t been sighted yet, the main proof driving these claims is the radiation spectral evidence of the disk clearing.
“The closer the planet is to the star, the hotter it is and hence the shorter the wavelengths are that are emitted by it,” Forrest said.
The IRS Spectrum clearly shows that the optically thick outer disc has an inner truncation at a much larger radius than previously suggested, thus proving strong evidence for the presence of gaps in the protoplanetary discs.
The most plausible explanation for this gap in the short lifetime of the star is the appearance of giant gas planets.
Reporting by Shweta Krishnan and Emily Paret.
