Astronomy
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Astronomy
After a martian dust storm
The largest dust storm seen on Mars in more than 2 decades is now beginning to wane.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
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.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
New alcohol added to space-stuff catalog
Researchers have discovered the molecule vinyl alcohol in space.
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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.
By Ben Harder -
Astronomy
A Cosmic Crisis?
Astronomers appear to have a heavenly crisis on their hands, and it concerns material they can't even detect.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Faint body may be galaxy building block
Using a cosmic zoom lens, astronomers may have found one of the first building blocks of a galaxy in the universe.
By Ron Cowen -
Astronomy
Probe’s comet encounter yields close-ups
A crippled NASA probe successfully navigated close enough to Comet Borrelly to capture and beam home black-and-white and infared images of its nucleus and new data about ions and other particles that radiate from it.
By Ben Harder