Ron Cowen

All Stories by Ron Cowen

  1. Astronomy

    Age of the universe: A new determination

    Analyzing the faint glow left over from the Big Bang, scientists report measuring the age of the cosmos with unprecedented accuracy—14 billion years, accurate to within half a billion years.

  2. Astronomy

    Young stars shed light on young sun

    If our own sun had been as active in its youth as is a group of young sunlike stars recently observed with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, it could account for the abundance of several isotopes, such as aluminum-26, calcium-41, and beryllium-10 found in meteorites.

  3. Astronomy

    Asteroid studies reveal new puzzles

    Belying the image of an asteroid as a bare rock, a detailed study of the asteroid 433 Eros reveals that many of its crater floors and depressions are coated with fine dust and nearly half of the largest rocks strewn across the asteroid's surface represent material blasted from a single crater.

  4. Astronomy

    Moon plume breaks the record

    The Galileo spacecraft has found the tallest plume seen so far on Jupiter's moon Io, the only volcanically active moon known in the solar system.

  5. Astronomy

    A Cosmic Crisis?

    Astronomers appear to have a heavenly crisis on their hands, and it concerns material they can't even detect.

  6. Astronomy

    Faint body may be galaxy building block

    Using a cosmic zoom lens, astronomers may have found one of the first building blocks of a galaxy in the universe.

  7. Astronomy

    After a failure, a new craft to sail

    Despite the July 20 failure of its mission to test the unfurling of a solar sail in a suborbital trajectory, the Planetary Society announced plans in late August to conduct a second test of a sail-propelled craft.

  8. Astronomy

    A meteorite’s pristine origins

    A rare, carbon-rich meteorite that fell into a frozen Canadian lake last year ranks as the most pristine of such specimens ever found.

  9. Astronomy

    Gravity’s lens: Finding a sextet of images

    Astronomers have for the first time found a gravitational lens in which the image of a distant galaxy has been split into six distinct images.

  10. Astronomy

    Gravity’s lens: Finding a dim cluster

    Relying solely on a gravitational mirage rather than visible images, astronomers have discovered a previously unknown cluster of galaxies and measured its distance from Earth.

  11. Astronomy

    When Branes Collide

    A controversial new theory proposes that our universe existed as a cold, featureless void for eons, until a parallel universe floating through a hidden fifth dimension crashed into it, igniting the Big Bang.

  12. Planetary Science

    Galileo finds spires on Callisto

    The sharpest images ever taken of Jupiter's icy moon Callisto show a group of features never seen before on the remote body—icy, knoblike spires that show signs of slow but steady erosion.