All Stories by Ron Cowen
- Astronomy
Beryllium data confirm stars’ age
Measuring trace amounts of beryllium in two elderly stars, astronomers have found additional evidence that the first stars in the universe formed less than 200 million years after the Big Bang.
- Planetary Science
A really cool map
A new infrared image of Saturn's rings provides the most detailed temperature map ever taken of these icy particles.
- Astronomy
Rocky Road: Planet hunting gets closer to Earth
Astronomers have discovered the three lightest planets known outside the solar system, moving researchers closer to the goal of finding extrasolar planets that resemble Earth.
- Astronomy
Super Portrait: X-ray telescope eyes supernova remnant
Trained on Cassiopeia A for 11.5 days, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has taken the most detailed portrait ever recorded of any supernova remnant.
- Planetary Science
Saturn Watch: Cassini finds two new moons and lightning
The Cassini spacecraft has detected two moons that may be the smallest ever found around Saturn as well as changes in the character of lightning first detected in Saturn's atmosphere in the early 1980s.
- Astronomy
Cosmic Melody
An astronomer has converted fluctuations in the density of the early universe—the seeds of the first galaxies and stars—into audible sound.
- Planetary Science
Finding a lunar meteorite’s home
Scientists have for the first time pinpointed the source of a meteorite that came from the moon.
- Astronomy
3-D solar eruptions
Solar physicists have developed a technique to obtain the three-dimensional structure of coronal mass ejections by using two-dimensional images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
- Astronomy
One of Hubble’s Tools Fails: Observatory loses a sharp ultraviolet eye
With the failure last week of an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have lost their only sharp ultraviolet eye on the universe.
- Astronomy
Old stars shed light on young Milky Way
Analyzing the composition of 70 of the oldest stars in the galaxy—the largest such sample so far—scientists have found new evidence that a generation of short-lived stars that died explosively must have preceded this elderly population and that the oldest part of the Milky Way originated not as a single component, but as bits and pieces that may have taken several hundred million years to form and coalesce.
- Planetary Science
The sound of rings
When Cassini reached Saturn on June 30, it twice dashed through a gap in the planet's rings, and onboard science instruments recorded a flurry of ring dust harmlessly striking the spacecraft.
- Astronomy
Explosive News: Telescopes find signs of gentler gamma-ray bursts
Astronomers appear to have discovered an unexpected population of low-energy gamma-ray bursts, and they could be 10 times more numerous than previously-known higher-energy bursts.
