Ron Cowen

All Stories by Ron Cowen

  1. Astronomy

    Milky Way black hole gets real

    Tracing the path of a star orbiting near the center of our galaxy, astronomers have found the best evidence to date that a supermassive black hole lies at the Milky Way’s core.

  2. Astronomy

    Cosmic rays from the solar system

    Dust grains from the Kuiper belt, a storehouse of comets and other frozen bodies in the outer solar system, are the source of some of the lower energy cosmic rays that bombard Earth.

  3. Astronomy

    Jet Astronomy

    For the first time, scientists have traced the slowing and dimming of X-ray-emitting jets from a black hole.

  4. Astronomy

    Neutron Star Stuff: Just neutrons, no quarks

    A new study suggests that although neutron stars may be weird, they’re not strange.

  5. Astronomy

    Enlarging a Mars photo album

    A new set of more than 18,000 images of Mars, posted online in early October, features the sharpest picture of the Red Planet ever taken by an orbiting spacecraft.

  6. Astronomy

    Iron-Poor Star: Closing in on the birth of the first stars

    Astronomers have found a star so old and metal poor that its chemical composition carries vestiges of the origin of our galaxy.

  7. Astronomy

    Cloudy Findings: A new population shows up in the Milky Way

    A radio telescope has detected a previously unknown population of hundreds of hydrogen clouds in the gaseous halo that surrounds the disk of our galaxy.

  8. Astronomy

    News flash: Earth still has only one moon

    An object discovered orbiting Earth in early September isn't a moon but something much more mundane—an upper stage of a rocket that was used in the Apollo 12 mission to the moon.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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.

  12. Tech

    Ribbon to the Stars

    Advances in one of the tiniest of technologies—carbon nanotubes—is bringing the concept of a space elevator closer to reality.