Space
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Planetary Science
Martian Gullies: Carved by melting snow?
Melting snow may have sculpted the recently formed gullies found at midlatitudes on Mars.
By Ron Cowen -
Planetary Science
Space Class
If you’re looking for classroom materials tied to recent NASA news reports, such as evidence suggesting the presence of water on Mars, this Web site pulls together a variety of articles, images, and Web links related to any given report. The archive includes topics such as solar storms, meteors, planetary alignments, eclipses, and many others. […]
By Science News -
Astronomy
Gamma-ray craft plunges into Pacific
As planned, NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which had detected some of the highest-energy radiation in the universe for 9 years, crashed into the Pacific Ocean on June 4.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Stars’ wobbles reveal six more planets
Swiss astronomers have found indirect evidence of six additional planets that lie outside the solar system, bringing the tally to more than 40.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Cosmic Revelations: Satellite homes in on the infant universe
A new portrait of the infant universe pins down the age of the universe—13.7 billion years—to an unprecedented accuracy of 1 percent, provides new evidence that the universe began with a brief but humongous growth spurt, and reveals that it already contained a plethora of stars when it was just 200 million years old.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Starry eruption on a grand scale
Monitoring the bloated star Rho Cassiopeiae, astronomers report they witnessed an explosion that blasted more material into space than any other stellar explosion ever observed.
By Ron Cowen -
Planetary Science
New moons for Neptune?
Astronomers say they have discovered three additional moons circling Neptune.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Gamma-ray burst leaves ephemeral afterglow
A ground-based telescope on automatic pilot has taken one of the earliest images ever recorded of the visible-light afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, one of the most energetic flashes of radiation in the universe.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
In the Beginning: Dark matter builds galaxies, feeds quasars
Cosmologists say they have found compelling evidence that massive galaxies were already in place when the universe was less than a billion years old.
By Sid Perkins -
Astronomy
Sundancing
Astronomers have solved the mystery of why supergranules—enormous cells of turbulent, charged gas on the sun's surface—appear to move across the sun faster than the sun rotates.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Planet Formation on the Fast Track
New computer simulations suggest that planets as massive as Jupiter may have formed in only a few hundred years rather than several million years, as the leading theory of planet formation requires.
By Ron Cowen