Astronomy

Astronomy

SOHO craft gets the lowdown on sunspots

Using sound waves to obtain the first clear picture of the structure beneath the surface of a sunspot, scientists say they now have an explanation for why these dark blemishes-sites of intense magnetic activity-can persist for days.

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.

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.

Astronomy

After a martian dust storm

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Astronomy

New alcohol added to space-stuff catalog

Researchers have discovered the molecule vinyl alcohol in space.

Astronomy

Distant spiral galaxy poses for Gemini

The newly operating Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph instrument on the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, took a high-resolution composite photograph of a galaxy 30 million light-years away.