Astronomy
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Astronomy
Spying a planet in star’s dusty veil
Astronomers blocked out the light of a nearby star and found hints of an orbiting planet.
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Astronomy
Alien stars pass close to home
Stars from an alien galaxy are raining down on our own Milky Way and passing just a few hundred light-years from Earth.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Solar Flip-Flops: Sun storms spawn magnetic reversal
Coronal mass ejections, billion-ton clouds of charged particles blasted from the sun, appear to play a key role in reversing the sun's magnetic poles every 11 years.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Sound of the fury
On Oct. 28, the Saturn-bound Cassini spacecraft recorded the radio wave "sound" of a powerful solar flare as it raced toward Earth.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Chow Down! Milky Way gobbles its closest known neighbor
A tiny, newly discovered galaxy being shredded by the gravity of the Milky Way is our galaxy's closest known neighbor, residing just 42,000 light-years from the Milky Way's center.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Hot and Heavy Star Birth: Young cosmos delivers massive stars
Aided by a gravitational zoom lens, astronomers have discovered the hottest, brightest, and most crowded star-forming region ever observed.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Out of Hiding: Lost asteroid reappears, bringing surprises
A long-lost asteroid that came close to Earth in 1937 has been spotted again, and its projected path steers clear of Earth.
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Astronomy
Cosmic Survey: Galaxy map reveals dark business as usual
The most precise map of how galaxies cluster, pulled together by the tug of gravity, has confirmed that most of the cosmos is in the dark, consisting of 5 percent ordinary matter, 25 percent dark matter, and 70 percent dark energy.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
When really big winds collide
A newly released image shows dramatic details of the Crescent nebula, a giant gaseous shell created by outbursts of a massive star about to explode as a supernova.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Vanishing planet
An object orbiting a distant star is too heavy to be a planet, researchers have concluded.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Extrasolar planet gets heavier
An extrasolar planet that tightly orbits its parent star is heavier than astronomers had thought.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Super Data: Hail the cosmic revolution
Ten extremely distant supernovas recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope provide evidence that something is pushing objects in the cosmos apart at an ever-faster rate.
By Ron Cowen