p. I-10: parabaloid should be paraboloid.
p. 418, chapter opener: next to last line: neutrons should be neutrinos.
p. 427, proton-proton chain diagram:
The last line is:
2He3 + 2He3 --> 2He4 + 2(1He1)
It should be:
2He3 + 2He3 --> 2He 4 + 2(1H1)
Appendices:
Typos, Appendix 7, Nearest Stars
For Wolf 359, the V magnitude is +13.45.
The declination of 61 Cyg is +38 45.
Appendix 11 lists element 118, whose discovery was reported at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1999 with a paper in the Physical Review. But the discovery was withdrawn in July 2001 in an embarrassing reversal. The original paper reported the detection of 3 chains of decay to elements 116, then 114, then 112, and so on down to element 106. The chains were thought to reveal the fusion of a krypton atom and a lead atom to make element 118. But reexamination of the data, following failures to produce more of element 118 in the same way, indicated that the chains did not exist. reference: New York Times, July 28, 2001, p. A26. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/28/science/28LAB.html
Megabytes aren't really a million bytes, since computers use binary
numbers. Since 2^1=1, 2^2=4, 2^3=8, 2^4=16, 2^5=32, 2^6=64, 2^7=128,
2^8=256, 2^9=512, 2^10=1024, and not 1000, new prefixes were voted by
the International Electrotechnical Commission, with kibi (instead of
kilo) for 10^10, mebi (instead of mega) for 10^20, and gibi (instead
of giga) for 2^30.
[Science, 283, 12 March 1999, p. 1631]
Many photographs from the Electronic Universe Project at the
University of Oregon.
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/messier.html
As a result of further study since the first Hipparcos list was released, the 38th star in the Appendix, G 41-14, turned out to have only a photometric parallax and to be a binary with a corrected distance of about 6.5 pc. Thus stars below it move up in rank, and the new star 50 is Altair.
A more accurate value of Planck's constant has been determined by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Its value is 6.62606891 x 10^-34 J s, with an uncertainty of 89 parts per billion. (Reference: E. R. Williams, R. L. Steiner, D. B. Newell, P. T. Olsen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 2404, 1998)
This table was provided by Dan Green of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
See also Mark Winter's periodic table at www.webelements.com.
Following new theoretical calculations, element 116, mass number 289 element 118, mass number 293 wre created in April 1999 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Earlier theory had indicated that these elements could not be formed from a collision of lead and krypton, but the new theory led scientists to try. Bombarding a lead target with krypton atoms gave the result. Each of the atoms of element 118 were created decayed into element 116 in less than 1/10,000 second.
The lifetimes were longer than those of the immediately preceding elemenets, still leaving hope that element 126 might be stable. The LBNL team will fire ruthenium atoms at a lead target to try to create this element 126.
Using the same technique as was used for discovering element 110, the German team discovered three atoms of element 111 in December 1994. To do so, they bombarded bismuth-209 with nickel-63. The resultant atoms of element 111 decayed into previously unknown isotopes of elements 109 and then 107. In February 1995, they created element 112. The single nucleus, with 165 neutrons, decayed in less than a microsecond, but the researchers could follow the alpha particles it emitted as it decayed.
A team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, near Moscow, created a nucleus of element 114 (reported in Science, 22 January 1999, p. 474). It seemed to last for 30 seconds before decaying, which would indicate that predictions of an island of stability of elements is correct.
The team, a collaboration between Dubna and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had to skip element 113, but pounded a plutonium-244 target with calcium-48, a rare calcium isotope. They think they found the decay chain starting with the 289 isotope of element 114.
Typo in the published book: the sidereal periods from Enceladus out are given with superscripts h, m, and s, whereas they should be d, h, and m.
Two irregular satellites have been discovered in orbit around Uranus, several hundred planetary radii out. Their orbits are inclined, retrograde, and eccentric, and their radii are estimated to be only 60 and 30 km, respectively. Since they are reddish objects, they may well be linked to other recently discovered bodies in the outer Solar System; moons in such orbits are presumably captured. They have been named Sycorax and Caliban from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Sycorax is a witch and Caliban is her son. The discovery reported by Brett Gladman, Philip Nicholson, Joseph Burns, J Kavelaars, Brian Marsden, Gareth Williams, and Warren Ofutt, in NATURE for April 1998.