Space

Astronomy

Beryllium data confirm stars’ age

Measuring trace amounts of beryllium in two elderly stars, astronomers have found additional evidence that the first stars in the universe formed less than 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Planetary Science

Exploring Mars

Here’s your chance to help NASA explore the surface of Mars. At its Marsoweb site, the agency provides detailed maps, engineering data, and interactive tools for studying the Red Planet’s alien terrain. Visitors are invited to look for and report important geologic features that haven’t yet been catalogued or even viewed by researchers. Go to: […]

Planetary Science

A really cool map

A new infrared image of Saturn's rings provides the most detailed temperature map ever taken of these icy particles.

Astronomy

Rocky Road: Planet hunting gets closer to Earth

Astronomers have discovered the three lightest planets known outside the solar system, moving researchers closer to the goal of finding extrasolar planets that resemble Earth.

Astronomy

Super Portrait: X-ray telescope eyes supernova remnant

Trained on Cassiopeia A for 11.5 days, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has taken the most detailed portrait ever recorded of any supernova remnant.

Planetary Science

Martian ice could be sculpting surface patterns

Images taken by the Mars Global Surveyor suggest that most areas with geological features known as patterned ground appear at high latitudes.

Planetary Science

Saturn Watch: Cassini finds two new moons and lightning

The Cassini spacecraft has detected two moons that may be the smallest ever found around Saturn as well as changes in the character of lightning first detected in Saturn's atmosphere in the early 1980s.

Astronomy

Cosmic Melody

An astronomer has converted fluctuations in the density of the early universe—the seeds of the first galaxies and stars—into audible sound.

Planetary Science

Finding a lunar meteorite’s home

Scientists have for the first time pinpointed the source of a meteorite that came from the moon.

Astronomy

3-D solar eruptions

Solar physicists have developed a technique to obtain the three-dimensional structure of coronal mass ejections by using two-dimensional images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Astronomy

One of Hubble’s Tools Fails: Observatory loses a sharp ultraviolet eye

With the failure last week of an instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have lost their only sharp ultraviolet eye on the universe.

Astronomy

Old stars shed light on young Milky Way

Analyzing the composition of 70 of the oldest stars in the galaxy—the largest such sample so far—scientists have found new evidence that a generation of short-lived stars that died explosively must have preceded this elderly population and that the oldest part of the Milky Way originated not as a single component, but as bits and pieces that may have taken several hundred million years to form and coalesce.