All Stories by Ron Cowen
- Space
Betelgeuse shrinks
A familiar star, visible to the naked eye, has shrunk dramatically in just 15 years.
- Astronomy
Pinning down a pulsar’s age
Reporting at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, researchers suggest some of these swirling stellar remnants are older, younger by a factor of 10.
- Space
Galactic black holes may be more massive than thought
The giant black holes at the cores of massive nearby galaxies may be two to four times heftier than estimated.
- Space
Astrometry nabs an exoplanet
long-proposed method of searching for extrasolar planets has finally discovered one — a body six times heavier than Jupiter that orbits a dwarf star 20 light-years from Earth.
- Tech
Earliest known sound recordings revealed
Researchers unveil imprints made 20 years before Edison invented phonograph.
- Space
Evidence mounts for liquid interior of a Saturn moon
Plumes of Enceladus offer hints that moon is now or was in the recent past partially liquid inside.
- Space
Last Hubble rendezvous
During five successful space walks, astronauts repaired and rejuvenated the Hubble Space Telescope.
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Four space walks to Hubble completed
Final repair mission to Hubble launched May 11 enjoys success so far.
- Space
Cosmic dustup settles
Two new studies document how crystalline dust forms in the hot, inner part of a young star’s planet-making disk and then gets incorporated into the cold, comet-forming region billions of kilometers away.
- Space
Final Hubble repair mission begins
The final mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope lifted off May 11.
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- Space
Honing the Hubble constant
Revised value supports finding that dark energy does not vary with time.
