Astronomy

Astronomy

Something New on the Sun

The sharpest visible-light images of the sun ever recorded are revealing puzzling, new features of sunspots, the dark regions where the sun's powerful magnetic field is concentrated.

Astronomy

Milky Way black hole gets real

Tracing the path of a star orbiting near the center of our galaxy, astronomers have found the best evidence to date that a supermassive black hole lies at the Milky Way’s core.

Astronomy

Cosmic rays from the solar system

Dust grains from the Kuiper belt, a storehouse of comets and other frozen bodies in the outer solar system, are the source of some of the lower energy cosmic rays that bombard Earth.

Astronomy

Jet Astronomy

For the first time, scientists have traced the slowing and dimming of X-ray-emitting jets from a black hole.

Astronomy

Neutron Star Stuff: Just neutrons, no quarks

A new study suggests that although neutron stars may be weird, they’re not strange.

Astronomy

New views of Jovian moons

The Galileo spacecraft has taken the highest-resolution images ever recorded of three of Jupiter's small, innermost moons.

Astronomy

Galaxies shine light on dark matter

Using a cosmic mirage known as gravitational lensing, astronomers have developed detailed maps of the distribution of dark matter, the invisible material believed to make up 90 percent of the mass of the universe.

Astronomy

Astronomers rediscover long-lost asteroid

After 89 years of playing a cosmic version of Where's Waldo?, astronomers have located a long-lost asteroid named Albert.

Astronomy

Enlarging a Mars photo album

A new set of more than 18,000 images of Mars, posted online in early October, features the sharpest picture of the Red Planet ever taken by an orbiting spacecraft.

Astronomy

Iron-Poor Star: Closing in on the birth of the first stars

Astronomers have found a star so old and metal poor that its chemical composition carries vestiges of the origin of our galaxy.

Astronomy

Astronomers find evidence of missing matter

Astronomers say they've likely confirmed that half of the hydrogen gas in the universe, which had not been accounted for, resides in relatively nearby reaches of intergalactic space.

Astronomy

Cloudy Findings: A new population shows up in the Milky Way

A radio telescope has detected a previously unknown population of hundreds of hydrogen clouds in the gaseous halo that surrounds the disk of our galaxy.