Space
- Astronomy
Timing a Moonrise: Van Gogh painting put on the calendar
Astronomical detectives suggest that van Gogh painted the picture now known as "Moonrise" in 1889, capturing the rising moon as it appeared at 9:08 p.m. local mean time on July 13.
- Astronomy
Telescope unveils a stellar deception
A heavenly masquerade may shed light on the nature of astrophysical jets—the beams of material spewed by a wide variety of celestial objects.
- Astronomy
Solar Terrain: Revealing the sun’s complex topography
The sharpest images of the sun ever taken, released last week, show our stellar neighbor’s rugged surface in new and surprising detail.
- Astronomy
Stellar Top: Astronomers find a squashed star
Astronomers have found a rapidly spinning, squashed star that is more than 1.5 times as wide as it is tall.
- Astronomy
Telescope spies a galactic satellite
A huge gas cloud once considered a remnant from when the Milky Way or nearby galaxies formed is, in fact, a satellite of our galaxy.
- Astronomy
Mystery in the Middle
The Milky Way's core is loaded with seemingly young stars, which have no business being there.
- Astronomy
Neutron stars twist Einstein’s theory
Astronomers may finally have found evidence of a key prediction of Einstein's general theory of relativity—that a spinning object drags space-time along with it.
- Astronomy
Sharpening a Heavenly Image: Clear view of globular cluster’s crowded core
Using innovative optics to take the twinkle out of starlight, the Gemini North Telescope on Hawaii's Mauna Kea has recorded the sharpest infrared images ever of a crowded grouping of Milky Way stars.
- Astronomy
Lucky shot
To protect its sensitive optics, the Hubble Space Telescope had to turn its back on last November’s Leonid meteor storm, and that fortuitously put the luminous Helix nebula directly in the telescope’s sightline.
- Astronomy
Galactic RAVE
A new study of thousands of Milky Way stars and their motion toward and away from Earth should provide new clues about how our galaxy formed.
- Planetary Science
Slowdown on Saturn? Windy doings on the ringed planet
The winds in Saturn’s upper atmosphere are some of the swiftest in the solar system, but recent findings suggest there’s been a dramatic slowdown.
- Astronomy
Finding a nearby star
Astronomers have discovered a star that may be among the very closest known to us.
