Space
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We summarize the week's science breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Space
Former planet may have grown a tail
Pluto appears to trail a cometlike cloud of gas.
By Ron Cowen - Space
Science on the penultimate space shuttle
Endeavour carries $2-billion experiment to hunt for exotic physics.
- Space
Atom & Cosmos
Clearing out space junk with dust, plus new black holes, sonic-boom star birth and more in this week’s news.
By Science News - Space
Dry ice, wetter Mars
A previously unknown reservoir of frozen carbon dioxide could periodically vaporize, thickening the atmosphere and allowing liquid water to flow on the Red Planet’s surface.
By Ron Cowen - Space
Atom & Cosmos
How to hunt for extraterrestrials, plus cosmic bursts, horseshoe orbits and more in this week’s news.
By Science News - Space
NASA pulls out of astrophysics missions
Europe is now on its own for two planned spacecraft to study black holes and gravitational waves.
By Ron Cowen - Physics
Time travel nixed in metamaterial world
A desktop universe captures essential properties of the real thing.
By Devin Powell - Space
NASA picks shuttles’ retirement homes
Museums in New York, California, Florida and Virginia will display the four spacecraft after their final mission in June.
By Ron Cowen - Space
XENON100 fails to find dark matter
A hundred days of solitude for an experiment designed to rendezvous with the universe's missing mass put new limits on the elusive material's properties.
By Ron Cowen - Space
Atom & Cosmos
Life in black holes, energy from dark matter and other intriguing possibilities in this week's news
By Ron Cowen - Space
Baffling blowup in distant galaxy
A high-energy blast has gone on for 11 days, puzzling astronomers as to its source.
By Ron Cowen - Space
Pioneer puzzle pinned on thermodynamics
Waste heat, not exotic physics, is slowing two 1970s-era space probes down more than would be expected, a new study claims.
By Ron Cowen