Ron Cowen

All Stories by Ron Cowen

  1. Astronomy

    New views of Jovian moons

    The Galileo spacecraft has taken the highest-resolution images ever recorded of three of Jupiter's small, innermost moons.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Astronomy

    Are solar eruptions triggered a loopy way?

    Astronomers have identified a new solar mechanism that may explain some coronal mass ejections.

  9. Planetary Science

    A Comet’s Long Tail Tickles Ulysses

    Stretching more than half a billion kilometers, the ion tail that Comet Hyakutake flaunted when it passed near the sun in 1996 is the longest ever recorded and suggests that otherwise invisible comets could be detected by searching for their tails.

  10. Planetary Science

    Rocks on the ice

    Pristine fragments of a meteorite that fell January 18 in the frozen Yukon and that remained frozen until they were delivered to a NASA laboratory may reveal much about the earliest days of the solar system.

  11. Astronomy

    Black holes and their galaxies: A closer link

    Supermassive black holes and the galaxies they inhabit appear to grow up together.

  12. Astronomy

    Less Massive than Saturn?

    Astronomers pass a milestone in the search for new worlds.