Astronomy

Astronomy

Death of a pioneer

Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to reach the fringes of the solar system, appears to have sent its last feeble signal to Earth on Jan. 22.

Astronomy

Cosmic Doomsday Scenario: Phantom energy would trigger the Big Rip

According to a new model, the universe may end with a Big Rip—every galaxy, star, planet, molecule, and atom torn asunder and the cosmos ceasing to exist some 21 billion years from now.

Astronomy

Dead stars may masquerade as ingenues

A heavenly deception in which dead stars lie about their ages could throw into disarray theories describing some of the densest objects in the cosmos.

Astronomy

Mature Before Their Time

Some galaxies were in place and forming stars at a prolific rate when the universe, now 13.7 billion years old, was just an 800-million-year-old whippersnapper.

Astronomy

Gamma-ray craft plunges into Pacific

As planned, NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, which had detected some of the highest-energy radiation in the universe for 9 years, crashed into the Pacific Ocean on June 4.

Astronomy

Stars’ wobbles reveal six more planets

Swiss astronomers have found indirect evidence of six additional planets that lie outside the solar system, bringing the tally to more than 40.

Astronomy

Cosmic Revelations: Satellite homes in on the infant universe

A new portrait of the infant universe pins down the age of the universe—13.7 billion years—to an unprecedented accuracy of 1 percent, provides new evidence that the universe began with a brief but humongous growth spurt, and reveals that it already contained a plethora of stars when it was just 200 million years old.

Astronomy

Starry eruption on a grand scale

Monitoring the bloated star Rho Cassiopeiae, astronomers report they witnessed an explosion that blasted more material into space than any other stellar explosion ever observed.

Astronomy

Gamma-ray burst leaves ephemeral afterglow

A ground-based telescope on automatic pilot has taken one of the earliest images ever recorded of the visible-light afterglow of a gamma-ray burst, one of the most energetic flashes of radiation in the universe.

Astronomy

In the Beginning: Dark matter builds galaxies, feeds quasars

Cosmologists say they have found compelling evidence that massive galaxies were already in place when the universe was less than a billion years old.

Astronomy

Sundancing

Astronomers have solved the mystery of why supergranules—enormous cells of turbulent, charged gas on the sun's surface—appear to move across the sun faster than the sun rotates.

Astronomy

Planet Formation on the Fast Track

New computer simulations suggest that planets as massive as Jupiter may have formed in only a few hundred years rather than several million years, as the leading theory of planet formation requires.