Astronomy

Astronomy

Gamma-ray craft plunges into Pacific

As planned, NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which had detected some of the highest-energy radiation in the universe for 9 years, crashed into the Pacific Ocean on June 4.

Astronomy

Stars’ wobbles reveal six more planets

Swiss astronomers have found indirect evidence of six additional planets that lie outside the solar system, bringing the tally to more than 40.

Astronomy

Cosmic Revelations: Satellite homes in on the infant universe

A new portrait of the infant universe pins down the age of the universe—13.7 billion years—to an unprecedented accuracy of 1 percent, provides new evidence that the universe began with a brief but humongous growth spurt, and reveals that it already contained a plethora of stars when it was just 200 million years old.

Astronomy

Starry eruption on a grand scale

Monitoring the bloated star Rho Cassiopeiae, astronomers report they witnessed an explosion that blasted more material into space than any other stellar explosion ever observed.

Astronomy

Gamma-ray burst leaves ephemeral afterglow

A ground-based telescope on automatic pilot has taken one of the earliest images ever recorded of the visible-light afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, one of the most energetic flashes of radiation in the universe.

Astronomy

In the Beginning: Dark matter builds galaxies, feeds quasars

Cosmologists say they have found compelling evidence that massive galaxies were already in place when the universe was less than a billion years old.

Astronomy

Sundancing

Astronomers have solved the mystery of why supergranules—enormous cells of turbulent, charged gas on the sun's surface—appear to move across the sun faster than the sun rotates.

Astronomy

Planet Formation on the Fast Track

New computer simulations suggest that planets as massive as Jupiter may have formed in only a few hundred years rather than several million years, as the leading theory of planet formation requires.

Astronomy

Distant and Strange: Orb isn’t just another extrasolar planet

A novel search technique that could ultimately find Earthlike worlds has uncovered an extrasolar planet that is 30 times farther away than any other planet detected and lies closer to its parent star than does any other orb discovered to date.

Astronomy

Sugarcoated news arrives from space

Scientists spotted a simple sugar in interstellar space for the first time.

Astronomy

Model Tracks Storms from the Sun

Teams of astronomers have developed a reliable method for predicting the time it takes for solar storms to arrive at Earth and have gathered observations confirming a model of how the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, manages to store up enough magnetic energy to induce these upheavals.

Astronomy

Runaway black hole

Observing a black hole and its visible companion star caroming through our galaxy, astronomers have found the best evidence to date that stellar-mass black holes are born during supernova explosions.