Astronomy

Astronomy

Getting a Clear View

Outfitted with a mirror that flexes several hundred times a second to compensate for the blurring induced by Earth’s atmosphere, one of the world’s sharpest telescopes just got a whole lot sharper.

Astronomy

Tidal tails tell tales of newborn galaxies

Some streams of gas and dust ripped out of large galaxies appear to form their own galaxies and may provide astronomers with a close-up view of galaxy formation.

Astronomy

An image to relish

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a high-resolution image of an object that looks like a giant hamburger.

Astronomy

Lonely Universe

In a universe dominated by a mysterious antigravity force, dubbed dark energy, distant galaxies will eventually recede from each other faster than the speed of light and observers in our Milky Way some 50 billion years from now will see only a handful of other galaxies in the sky.

Astronomy

Votes cast for and against the WIMP factor

Physicists this week duked it out over a bunch of WIMPs, elementary particles that—if they exist—could solve a decades-old mystery in cosmology and help unify the four fundamental forces of nature.

Astronomy

Close Encounter

In mid-August, asteroid 2002 NY40 came within 524,000 kilometers of Earth. Students from Yale University using a telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory captured a sequence of images of the 700-meter asteroid. Strung together into a movie, these images demonstrate the asteroid’s impressive speed, as seen from Earth over a period of two hours. The […]

Astronomy

A chance to point Hubble

Get out your heavenly wish list: Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope are soliciting suggestions for where to point the orbiting observatory this summer.

Astronomy

A possible signal from Polar Lander

Astronomers may have heard a faint signal from the vanished Mars Polar Lander spacecraft last month but, as of mid-February, have not detected another.

Astronomy

X-Ray Chaos: Violence shows itself in a nearby galaxy

New X-ray observations provide additional evidence that Centaurus A, the nearest radio-wave-emitting galaxy to Earth that has a supermassive black hole, is a maelstrom of violence.

Astronomy

Revved-Up Universe

Astronomers are busy testing the seemingly bizarre notion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Astronomy

Solar magnetism: Memories are made of this

Despite all its upheavals, the sun's magnetic field has a built-in memory, allowing it to return to its original position and configuration.

Astronomy

Milky Way gets a new layer

Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.