All Stories by Ron Cowen
- Planetary Science
Renegade moon
Saturn's outlier moon Phoebe didn't coalesce from material near the ringed planet but was captured from the distant Kuiper belt.
- Planetary Science
Mars Polar Lander: Lost but now found?
A reanalysis of an image taken 5 years ago suggests that planetary scientists have found the remains of the Mars Polar Lander, which vanished minutes before it was supposed to touch down on the Red Planet.
- Planetary Science
Craft show
The Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft recently imaged Mars Odyssey and Mars Express, marking the first time that a spacecraft orbiting a planet other than Earth has captured images of other craft circling the same planet.
- Planetary Science
Roaming Giants: Did migrating planets shape the solar system?
New simulations suggest that the solar system's four biggest planets were once bunched together, setting up a planetary bowling game that rapidly and violently rearranged the structure of the outer solar system and tossed chunks of debris inward.
- Planetary Science
Ringing in a new moon
The Cassini spacecraft has spotted a new moon of Saturn, only the second known to lie within the planet's main rings.
- Planetary Science
Roving on the Red Planet
Scientists review the discoveries made by the Mars rovers after nearly 18 months on the Red Planet.
- Planetary Science
Saturnian moonscape
Planetary scientists have obtained their closest image yet of Epimetheus, one of Saturn's tiny moons.
- Astronomy
Spotty neutron stars
Astronomers have for the first time discerned hot spots on the surfaces of neutron stars.
- Astronomy
Fleeting Flash: Pinpointing a short gamma-ray burst
An invisible, highly energetic flash detected by a spacecraft early this week may have given astronomers their first glimpse of two neutron stars colliding to forge a black hole.
- Astronomy
Planetary Picture? Criteria for planethood cloud object’s identity
Astronomers are debating whether an image of a planetary-mass object orbiting a brown dwarf qualifies as the first image of an extrasolar planet.
- Astronomy
Shell of a finding
A new X-ray portrait of a supernova remnant suggests that this shell of hot gas may be hard to discern if the interstellar medium around the exploded star has extremely low density.
- Planetary Science
Far-out science
New measurements show that the planetoid Sedna spins more rapidly than earlier observations had suggested.
