Space

Astronomy

A Hubble Decade

To celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 10th anniversary, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., has created a new Web site devoted to the Earth-orbiting telescope and its spectacular images. Offering much more than pretty pictures, the site recounts Hubble’s discoveries, illustrates how the telescope works, and suggests various educational activities and games. Until […]

Astronomy

Celestial Divide: Finding two families of galaxies

By analyzing data from a mammoth sky survey, astromoners have found that galaxies divide into two distinct families, depending on their stellar mass.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Astronomy

Are solar eruptions triggered a loopy way?

Astronomers have identified a new solar mechanism that may explain some coronal mass ejections.

Astronomy

Black holes and their galaxies: A closer link

Supermassive black holes and the galaxies they inhabit appear to grow up together.

Planetary Science

Rocks on the ice

Pristine fragments of a meteorite that fell January 18 in the frozen Yukon and that remained frozen until they were delivered to a NASA laboratory may reveal much about the earliest days of the solar system.

Planetary Science

A Comet’s Long Tail Tickles Ulysses

Stretching more than half a billion kilometers, the ion tail that Comet Hyakutake flaunted when it passed near the sun in 1996 is the longest ever recorded and suggests that otherwise invisible comets could be detected by searching for their tails.

Planetary Science

Reviewers see red over recent Mars programs

NASA's two most recent missions to Mars failed because they were underfunded, managed by inexperienced people, and insufficiently tested, according to a report released March 28.