All Stories by Ron Cowen
- 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.
- Astronomy
Astronomers find evidence of missing matter
Astronomers say they've likely confirmed that half of the hydrogen gas in the universe, which had not been accounted for, resides in relatively nearby reaches of intergalactic space.
- 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.
- 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.
- Astronomy
X-ray satellite goes the distance
Using the sharp X-ray eye of an orbiting observatory, astronomers have employed a novel method to measure distance within the Milky Way.
- 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.
-
The planet that isn’t
An astronomer has formally retracted her claim that she and her colleagues had likely taken the first image of a planet outside the solar system.
- 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.
