Astronomy
- 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
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.
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- Astronomy
Craft spies new class of gamma-ray sources
Roughly half the 120 unidentified sources of high-energy gamma-ray emissions in the Milky Way—those at midgalactic latitudes—may comprise a new class of objects and originate from a belt of massive stars that lies only a few hundred light-years from the solar system.
- 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.
- Astronomy
Spacecraft sounds out the sun’s hidden half
By detecting sound waves that have traveled through the sun, two physicists have for the first time found a way to view disturbances on the sun's hidden half, providing a glimpse of stormy weather patterns a week to 10 days before they come into view.
- Astronomy
Getting a Clear View
Outfitted with a mirror that flexes several hundred times a second to compensate for the blurring induced by Earth’s atmosphere, one of the world’s sharpest telescopes just got a whole lot sharper.
- Astronomy
Tidal tails tell tales of newborn galaxies
Some streams of gas and dust ripped out of large galaxies appear to form their own galaxies and may provide astronomers with a close-up view of galaxy formation.
- Astronomy
No signal from Mars Polar Lander
A radio signal that NASA hoped came from the vanished Mars Polar Lander has a terrestrial origin, scientists from the space agency and Stanford University have concluded.
- Astronomy
Super fireworks
A blast wave from supernova 1987A, the brightest stellar explosion witnessed from Earth since 1604, has begun lighting up a ring of gas surrounding the explosion.
- Astronomy
Votes cast for and against the WIMP factor
Physicists this week duked it out over a bunch of WIMPs, elementary particles that—if they exist—could solve a decades-old mystery in cosmology and help unify the four fundamental forces of nature.
