All Stories by Ron Cowen
- Space
Brightest gamma-ray burst
A bit of luck helps astronomers detect the most luminous object ever recorded from Earth.
- Space
Rosetta finds a rocky jewel
On September 5, the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission became the first spacecraft to take a close-up portrait of a rare type of asteroid that lies in the main belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
- Space
PAMELA may have spotted the dark stuff
An orbiting observatory may have discovered particles of dark matter -- the proposed, invisible material that researchers believe holds the universe together.
- Space
Milky Way’s black hole seen in new detail
New radio wave observations are giving astronomers their closest look yet at the supermassive black hole believed to be lurking at the center of our galaxy.
- Physics
Short-lived particle questions long-lived theory
In sifting through the ashes of a short-lived subatomic particle called the kaon, physicists are slowly accumulating new hints that the theory of elementary particles might one day have to be modified.
- Space
Tiny object points to remote solar system reservoir
Possible comet may be distant visitor from the innermost region of the Oort Cloud, the proposed comet reservoir of the outermost solar system.
- Physics
Stars ablaze in other skies
A new study suggests that a surprising number of universes, even those with laws of physics different from those in our universe, can still support stars.
- Space
Sharpshooting Enceladus
Swooping within 49 kilometers of Saturn’s tiny, geologically active moon Enceladus, the Cassini spacecraft has pinpointed the locations of the icy geysers that erupt from the southern hemisphere of this wrinkled moon’s surface.
- Space
Magellanic firestorm
To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 100,000th orbit about Earth, astronomers aimed the observatory at a firestorm of stellar activity in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.
- Space
How a star is born
Researchers have developed a new and accurate simulation of the birth of the first stars in the universe.
- Archaeology
Greeks followed a celestial Olympics
A Greek gadget discovered more than a century ago in a 2,100-year-old shipwreck not only tracked the motion of heavenly bodies and predicted eclipses, but also functioned as a sophisticated calendar and mapped the four-year cycle of the ancient Greek Olympics.
- Planetary Science
Cassini finds liquid ethane on Titan
After years of speculation, planetary scientists have now confirmed that Titan has at least one lake made of liquid ethane.
