Ron Cowen

All Stories by Ron Cowen

  1. Astronomy

    Visible Matter: Once lost but now found

    New observations confirm that most of the visible matter in the universe lies hidden in vast, hard-to-detect gas clouds between galaxies.

  2. Astronomy

    Icy Split: Comet fragments into 19 pieces

    A comet has split into 19 fragments strung out along a million-kilometer-long chain.

  3. Astronomy

    An assault on comets

    Over the next few years, a trio of comet missions, one of which was launched recently, promises to provide the closet look yet at the core of these icy relics from the formation of the solar system.

  4. Astronomy

    Moveable Feast: Milky Way dines on its neighbors

    Astronomers have found new evidence that the Milky Way is a cannibal, devouring streams of stars from its nearest galactic neighbors.

  5. Astronomy

    Pluto or bust?

    A new National Research Council report may revive plans to send a spacecraft to explore Pluto and its neighborhood.

  6. Astronomy

    Dying star illuminates its own shroud

    Images of a planetary nebula, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1997 but only recently assembled as a color composite, show a shroud of material cast off and ionized by the dying, sunlike star Henize 3-401.

  7. Astronomy

    Chandra eyes low-temperature black hole

    An observatory in space has detected the coolest black hole yet found

  8. Planetary Science

    Life on Europa: A possible energy source

    New evidence supports the notion that Jupiter's moon Europa contains an ocean beneath its icy surface, and a planetary scientist has proposed a novel way that Europa could be getting the energy required to sustain life within that ocean.

  9. Astronomy

    X-ray observatory captures a rare supernova

    Astronomers have obtained the first portrait of X-ray emission from a rare, so-called Ic supernova.

  10. Astronomy

    Let There Be Spin

    X-ray outbursts from two different pairs of stars in our Milky Way are providing clues about how the most rapidly rotating stars in the universe got their spin.

  11. Planetary Science

    Pristine fragments of asteroid breakup

    Planetary scientists have for the first time precisely dated a collision that smashed an asteroid into fragments.

  12. Astronomy

    Hubble Space Telescope: Eye wide open

    Two months after the failure of a fourth gyroscope shut it down, and 3 weeks after a shuttle crew paid it a service call, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in business.