Astronomy

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.

Astronomy

News flash: Earth still has only one moon

An object discovered orbiting Earth in early September isn't a moon but something much more mundane—an upper stage of a rocket that was used in the Apollo 12 mission to the moon.

Astronomy

X-ray satellite goes the distance

Using the sharp X-ray eye of an orbiting observatory, astronomers have employed a novel method to measure distance within the Milky Way.

Astronomy

A Hubble Decade

To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 10th anniversary, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., has created a new Web site devoted to the Earth-orbiting telescope and its spectacular images. Offering much more than pretty pictures, the site recounts Hubble’s discoveries, illustrates how the telescope works, and suggests various educational activities and games. Until […]

Astronomy

Celestial Divide: Finding two families of galaxies

By analyzing data from a mammoth sky survey, astromoners have found that galaxies divide into two distinct families, depending on their stellar mass.

Astronomy

Hefty Discovery: Finding a Kuiper belt king

A newly discovered celestial body appears to be the largest object that scientists have found in the solar system since their detection of Pluto in 1930.

Astronomy

Balloon Sounds Out the Early Universe

A balloon-borne experiment circling Antarctica has measured the curvature of the universe and revealed that it's perfectly flat.

Astronomy

Observatory on a suicide mission

Fearing that its 9-year-old workhorse, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, could plunge uncontrollably through the atmosphere if one more of its gyroscopes fails, NASA has decided to crash the spacecraft into the Pacific Ocean in early June.

Astronomy

Milky Way feasts on its neighbors

Three new studies reveal that Earth's home galaxy indulged in cannibalism to assemble its visible halo, the diffuse distribution of stars that surrounds the dense core and disk of the Milky Way.