Astronomy
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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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Are solar eruptions triggered a loopy way?
Astronomers have identified a new solar mechanism that may explain some coronal mass ejections.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Black holes and their galaxies: A closer link
Supermassive black holes and the galaxies they inhabit appear to grow up together.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Less Massive than Saturn?
Astronomers pass a milestone in the search for new worlds.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Found: Gamma-ray background information
Resolving a 30-year-old mystery, astronomers say they have identified the source of the faint, high-energy glow of radiation known as the gamma-ray background.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
X-ray telescope vanishes
Astro-E, a Japanese X-ray observatory, fell back to Earth and burned up just after launch on Feb. 9.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Craft spies new class of gamma-ray sources
Roughly half the 120 unidentified sources of high-energy gamma-ray emissions in the Milky Way—those at midgalactic latitudes—may comprise a new class of objects and originate from a belt of massive stars that lies only a few hundred light-years from the solar system.
By Ron Cowen