Astronomy

Astronomy

Messy Findings: Planets encounter a violent world

Some young planets continue to take a beating hundreds of millions of years after they've formed.

Astronomy

Planet Signs? Sifting a dusty disk

Infrared spectra of a disk of debris surrounding the young star Beta Pictoris reveals three distinct bands of dust, suggesting the location of a possible planet flanked by belts of asteroids or comets.

Astronomy

More space sugar

Astronomers have found a second, colder source of the simple sugar glycoaldehyde in a dust and gas cloud 26,000 light-years from Earth.

Astronomy

Big Smash: Galaxy clusters in collision

Astronomers have unveiled the most detailed image ever taken of the collision of two clusters of galaxies.

Astronomy

Sky Lights: Picture might show an extrasolar planet

A faint point of red light may be the first picture ever taken of a planet outside the solar system.

Astronomy

Crashing Genesis

Scientists are trying to salvage the fragile samples of the solar wind collected by the Genesis spacecraft, which crashed to Earth on Sept. 8 after its parachutes failed to open.

Astronomy

Beryllium data confirm stars’ age

Measuring trace amounts of beryllium in two elderly stars, astronomers have found additional evidence that the first stars in the universe formed less than 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomy

Rocky Road: Planet hunting gets closer to Earth

Astronomers have discovered the three lightest planets known outside the solar system, moving researchers closer to the goal of finding extrasolar planets that resemble Earth.

Astronomy

Super Portrait: X-ray telescope eyes supernova remnant

Trained on Cassiopeia A for 11.5 days, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has taken the most detailed portrait ever recorded of any supernova remnant.

Astronomy

Cosmic Melody

An astronomer has converted fluctuations in the density of the early universe—the seeds of the first galaxies and stars—into audible sound.

Astronomy

3-D solar eruptions

Solar physicists have developed a technique to obtain the three-dimensional structure of coronal mass ejections by using two-dimensional images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Astronomy

One of Hubble’s Tools Fails: Observatory loses a sharp ultraviolet eye

With the failure last week of an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have lost their only sharp ultraviolet eye on the universe.