All Stories by Ron Cowen
- Astronomy
An image to relish
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a high-resolution image of an object that looks like a giant hamburger.
- Planetary Science
It’s only a sharper moon
Astronomers have taken what appears to be the sharpest image of the moon ever recorded from Earth.
- Astronomy
Lonely Universe
In a universe dominated by a mysterious antigravity force, dubbed dark energy, distant galaxies will eventually recede from each other faster than the speed of light and observers in our Milky Way some 50 billion years from now will see only a handful of other galaxies in the sky.
- Astronomy
Votes cast for and against the WIMP factor
Physicists this week duked it out over a bunch of WIMPs, elementary particles that—if they exist—could solve a decades-old mystery in cosmology and help unify the four fundamental forces of nature.
- Planetary Science
Lost in Space: Comet mission appears to have broken apart
A spacecraft that had just begun its journey to two comets has fallen silent and may have broken apart.
- Astronomy
A chance to point Hubble
Get out your heavenly wish list: Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope are soliciting suggestions for where to point the orbiting observatory this summer.
- Astronomy
A possible signal from Polar Lander
Astronomers may have heard a faint signal from the vanished Mars Polar Lander spacecraft last month but, as of mid-February, have not detected another.
- Planetary Science
Tryst in space: Craft, asteroid rendezvous
On Valentine's Day, the NEAR spacecraft cozied up to the asteroid 433 Eros, becoming the first craft to orbit a tiny body.
- Astronomy
X-Ray Chaos: Violence shows itself in a nearby galaxy
New X-ray observations provide additional evidence that Centaurus A, the nearest radio-wave-emitting galaxy to Earth that has a supermassive black hole, is a maelstrom of violence.
- Astronomy
Revved-Up Universe
Astronomers are busy testing the seemingly bizarre notion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
- Astronomy
Solar magnetism: Memories are made of this
Despite all its upheavals, the sun's magnetic field has a built-in memory, allowing it to return to its original position and configuration.
- Astronomy
Milky Way gets a new layer
Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.
