Space
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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Space
Twisted roots for solar jets
Researchers have constructed the first 3-D image of a jet of gas zooming out of the sun's outer atmosphere, revealing the role that twisted magnetic fields play in generating such outbursts.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Galaxy’s youngest supernova
Astronomers have found the youngest Milky Way supernova remnant ever recorded from Earth.
By Ron Cowen - Space
A shifty moon
Astronomers have found evidence that the icy shell of Jupiter's large moon Europa has rotated nearly a quarter-turn, which supports the notion that the moon has a subterranean ocean.
By Ron Cowen - Materials Science
Like the Nobel, Only Norwegian
Two weeks from now, an astrophysicist, neuroscientist, and nanoscience researcher will each be named to receive $1 million Kavli Prizes.
By Janet Raloff -
- Space
BOOK LIST | Newton: Ackroyd’s Brief Lives
The book promises a personal history of Isaac Newton. Ackroyd also wrote Shakespeare: The Biography and London: The Biography. Nan A. Talese, 2008 176 p. $21.95 NEWTON: ACKROYD’S BRIEF LIVES
By Science News - Physics
John Wheeler (1911-2008)
SN Editor in Chief Tom Siegfried remembers the late physicist John Wheeler, who coined the term "black hole" in 1967, with excerpts from conversations the two had engaged in over the past two decades.
By Science News - Space
A special place
Two proposed studies might determine whether dark energy is real or humans live in a special place in the cosmos
By Ron Cowen - Space
A new look at the gamma-ray sky
Explosions pouring out as much energy in seconds as the sun does in its entire lifetime. Invisible beams of radiation sweeping across the sky like giant searchlights. Supermassive black holes emitting powerful and highly variable jets of radiation. GAMMA GLOW Simulation of the high-energy sky that will be seen by GLAST. Sonoma State, NASA The […]
By Ron Cowen - Space
Flooring the cosmic accelerator
If cosmologist Will Percival of the University of Portsmouth in England is right, the universe will end about 60 billion years from now, when every molecule and atom will be torn asunder by a mysterious entity that opposes gravity’s pull and turns it into a cosmic push.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Honing the Hubble
Astronomers are sharpening measurements of a familiar cosmic parameter to shed new light on dark energy, the mysterious entity that’s accelerating the universe’s rate of expansion.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
A Phoenix on Mars
A new robotic lander will search the north polar region of Mars for habitability.
By Ron Cowen