Astronomy
- 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.
- Astronomy
A Dark View of the Universe
Two new studies suggest that galaxies may be surrounded by vast halos of dark matter extending at least 1.5 million light-years from each galaxy's center.
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