Space
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Planetary Science
Moon spray
The Cassini spacecraft has found conclusive evidence that the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus spews jets of icy particles into space.
- Astronomy
A puny way to make planets
Brown dwarfs are failures in the star-making business, but new observations reveal that they may still succeed in growing planets.
- Astronomy
Cosmic Expansion: Supernovas shed light on dark energy
A new study of light from supernovas provides additional hints that dark energy, the mysterious entity revving up the expansion of the universe, might be distributed uniformly throughout space and time.
- Astronomy
Dark shadows
New radio telescope images of the center of the Milky Way make an even more compelling case that a supermassive black hole resides there.
- Planetary Science
Red Planet Express: Mars spacecraft traces a watery tale
A Mars-orbiting spacecraft has provided new details about when and where liquid water existed on the planet.
- Planetary Science
Martian dust storm
In late October, a day after Mars and Earth were at their closest approach until 2018, the Hubble Space Telescope captured an image of a large dust storm on the Red Planet.
- Astronomy
Ring around the galaxy
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the largest number ever of elliptical galaxies with Einstein rings, a marker of gravitational lensing.
- Planetary Science
Found and lost
Astronomers who previously announced that they had identified the likely remains of the Mars Polar Lander in images taken by an orbiting spacecraft now say that they were fooled by electronic noise in those images.
- Astronomy
Images of a fiery youth
A faint, infrared glow captured by the Spitzer Space Telescope might be light from the universe's first stars.
- Planetary Science
Mars or Bust!
Scientists are working to overcome the biomedical challenges that would hinder a human voyage to Mars.
- Astronomy
Infrared telescope spies mountains of star creation
Viewing a star-making region in the infrared, the Spitzer Space Telescope has captured mountains of gas and dust being eroded by winds and radiation from a massive star, triggering waves of star birth.
- Planetary Science
Cassini snaps icy moon Dione
Saturn's small moon Dione has a heavily-cratered, fractured surface.
