Astronomy

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.

Astronomy

A possible signal from Polar Lander

Astronomers may have heard a faint signal from the vanished Mars Polar Lander spacecraft last month but, as of mid-February, have not detected another.

Astronomy

A chance to point Hubble

Get out your heavenly wish list: Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope are soliciting suggestions for where to point the orbiting observatory this summer.

Astronomy

Revved-Up Universe

Astronomers are busy testing the seemingly bizarre notion that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

Astronomy

Solar magnetism: Memories are made of this

Despite all its upheavals, the sun's magnetic field has a built-in memory, allowing it to return to its original position and configuration.

Astronomy

Milky Way gets a new layer

Astronomers propose that 150 billion corpses of sunlike stars may blanket the visible disk of the galaxy.

Astronomy

Chandra eyes low-temperature black hole

An observatory in space has detected the coolest black hole yet found

Astronomy

Hubble Space Telescope: Eye wide open

Two months after the failure of a fourth gyroscope shut it down, and 3 weeks after a shuttle crew paid it a service call, the Hubble Space Telescope is back in business.

Astronomy

X-ray Data Reveal Black Holes Galore

Using a sensitive, new X-ray telescope, astronomers have identified the origin of the high-energy part of the X-ray background and found that supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies are far more numerous than visible-light surveys indicate.