Astronomy
- Astronomy
Celestial Divide: Finding two families of galaxies
By analyzing data from a mammoth sky survey, astromoners have found that galaxies divide into two distinct families, depending on their stellar mass.
- Astronomy
Hefty Discovery: Finding a Kuiper belt king
A newly discovered celestial body appears to be the largest object that scientists have found in the solar system since their detection of Pluto in 1930.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Astronomy
There’s life in the old galaxies yet
An unexpectedly large number of supermassive black holes in old galaxy clusters suggests these elderly groupings of galaxies aren't as quiescent as had been expected.
- Astronomy
Are solar eruptions triggered a loopy way?
Astronomers have identified a new solar mechanism that may explain some coronal mass ejections.
- Astronomy
Black holes and their galaxies: A closer link
Supermassive black holes and the galaxies they inhabit appear to grow up together.
- Astronomy
Big Bang Confirmed: Seeing twists and turns of primordial light
The latest observations of the cosmic microwave background reveal that photons from adjacent patches of the sky have slightly different polarizations.
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- Astronomy
Found: Gamma-ray background information
Resolving a 30-year-old mystery, astronomers say they have identified the source of the faint, high-energy glow of radiation known as the gamma-ray background.
- Astronomy
X-ray telescope vanishes
Astro-E, a Japanese X-ray observatory, fell back to Earth and burned up just after launch on Feb. 9.
