Space
Sign up for our newsletter
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- 			
			
		SpaceFormer planet may have grown a tail
Pluto appears to trail a cometlike cloud of gas.
By Ron Cowen - 			
			
		SpaceScience on the penultimate space shuttle
Endeavour carries $2-billion experiment to hunt for exotic physics.
 - 			
			
		SpaceAtom & 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 - 			
			
		SpaceDry 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 - 			
			
		SpaceAtom & Cosmos
How to hunt for extraterrestrials, plus cosmic bursts, horseshoe orbits and more in this week’s news.
By Science News - 			
			
		SpaceNASA 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 - 			
			
		PhysicsTime travel nixed in metamaterial world
A desktop universe captures essential properties of the real thing.
By Devin Powell - 			
			
		SpaceNASA 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 - 			
			
		SpaceXENON100 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 - 			
			
		SpaceAtom & Cosmos
Life in black holes, energy from dark matter and other intriguing possibilities in this week's news
By Ron Cowen - 			
			
		SpaceBaffling blowup in distant galaxy
A high-energy blast has gone on for 11 days, puzzling astronomers as to its source.
By Ron Cowen - 			
			
		SpacePioneer 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