Ron Cowen

All Stories by Ron Cowen

  1. Astronomy

    Extrasolar planets: More like home

    A trove of newly discovered planets orbiting other stars suggests that the solar system may not be the oddball it had begun to seem.

  2. Astronomy

    Meteor shower promises quite a show

    In the early morning hours of Nov. 18, sky watchers in North America may be treated to one of the most spectacular displays of shooting stars they're likely to see for a generation, if not longer.

  3. Astronomy

    After a martian dust storm

    The largest dust storm seen on Mars in more than 2 decades is now beginning to wane.

  4. Astronomy

    Tracking the path of a black hole

    Astronomers have for the first time measured the motion of a small black hole and a companion star speeding through our galactic neighborhood.

  5. Astronomy

    X-ray study: Energy from a black hole?

    Astronomers claim that for the first time, they've observed energy extracted from a black hole, or more precisely, from the tornadolike swirl of surrounding space that a spinning black hole drags along with it.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. Astronomy

    A Cosmic Crisis?

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

  11. 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.

  12. 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.