Astronomy

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.

Astronomy

There’s life in the old galaxies yet

An unexpectedly large number of supermassive black holes in old galaxy clusters suggests these elderly groupings of galaxies aren't as quiescent as had been expected.

Astronomy

Are solar eruptions triggered a loopy way?

Astronomers have identified a new solar mechanism that may explain some coronal mass ejections.

Astronomy

Black holes and their galaxies: A closer link

Supermassive black holes and the galaxies they inhabit appear to grow up together.

Astronomy

Big Bang Confirmed: Seeing twists and turns of primordial light

The latest observations of the cosmic microwave background reveal that photons from adjacent patches of the sky have slightly different polarizations.