Astronomy
- Astronomy
Gang of four: Debut of a big telescope
In the desert of northern Chile, a fourth 8.2-meter telescope opened for business, completing a quartet known as the Very Large Telescope.
- Astronomy
Craft finds where sun’s corona gets its hots
New findings may help explain an enduring solar riddle: Although the sun's outer atmosphere lies thousands of kilometers above the visible surface of the sun, it's about 1,000 times hotter.
- Astronomy
Spirograph in the sky
Some 2,000 light-years from Earth, an elderly star has ejected its outer layers to form a puffy, gaseous cocoon that resembles a "spirograph" pattern.
- Astronomy
Magnetic-mapping mission resurrected
The European Space Agency successfully launched Cluster II, a group of four spacecraft that will fly in tandem to generate a three-dimensional map of Earth's magnetosphere.
- Astronomy
Ulysses makes a return trip
Just as the sun has reached the stormy peak of its 11-year activity cycle, the European Space Agency's Ulysses spacecraft has begun its second and final pass over the sun's poles.
- Astronomy
Telescope unveils a stellar deception
A heavenly masquerade may shed light on the nature of astrophysical jets—the beams of material spewed by a wide variety of celestial objects.
- Astronomy
Taking a census of brown dwarfs
Researchers have completed the most thorough census to date of brown dwarfs in stellar clusters and have confirmed earlier findings about these failed stars.
- Astronomy
A new receiver for alien broadcasts
A $12.5 million grant will help build the world's largest telescope designed to search for radio broadcasts from alien civilizations.
- Astronomy
Neutron stars twist Einstein’s theory
Astronomers may finally have found evidence of a key prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity—that a spinning object drags space-time along with it.
- Astronomy
Young pulsar has a split personality
A new pulsar, the youngest discovered to date, unexpectedly exhibits properties of both regular pulsars and a recently explored class of supermagnetic pulsars, the magnetars.
- Astronomy
Telescope takes close-ups of distant star
Radio astronomers have for the first time probed ejected gas in the immediate surroundings of a distant star.
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