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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Astronomy
Andromeda’s building blocks
A radio telescope has made the first conclusive observations of gas clouds that could be the leftover building blocks of the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way’s closest large spiral neighbor.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Planetoid on the Fringe: Solar system record breaker
Lurking more than 13 billion kilometers from Earth in the coldest, remotest part of the solar system, a newly discovered body is the most distant object ever found to orbit the sun and the largest denizen of the solar system discovered since Pluto.
By Ron Cowen - Planetary Science
Revisiting a forgotten planet
Engineers are readying a NASA spacecraft for a May 11 launch to Mercury, one of the least-explored planets in the solar system.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Nudging asteroid fragments toward Earth
New computer simulations detail how fragments of asteroids travel to Earth and rain down as meteorites.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Invisible Universe
X-ray astronomy opens a new window on the most energetic cosmic events.
By Ron Cowen - Planetary Science
Radio link may hamper a Titan probe
A recently discovered communications problem could prevent the Huygens probe from relaying all of its precious data when it parachutes through the cloud-bedecked atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2004.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Deepest Vision Yet: Hubble takes ultralong look at the cosmos
Astronomers unveiled the deepest visible-light portrait of the universe ever taken, a million-second-long exposure by the Hubble Space Telescope that includes near-infrared images of what appear to be the most-distant galaxies known.
By Ron Cowen - Planetary Science
A New Flight Plan
President Bush recently unveiled an ambitious plan for a manned mission to Mars, using the moon as a testing area and stepping-stone, but for many planetary scientists the moon is a desirable destination in and of itself.
By Ron Cowen - Planetary Science
Red Planet Makes a Splash: Rover finds gush of evidence for past water
A robotic rover on Mars has gathered what scientists are calling the best evidence to date that liquid water once flowed on the Red Planet.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Pulsar pas de deux
Astronomers have for the first time discovered two pulsars orbiting each other, offering the chance for new precision tests of Einstein's theory of general relativity.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Wrenching Findings: Homing in on dark energy
In an analysis of a group of distant supernovas, astronomers have found hints that dark energy is distributed uniformly throughout space.
By Ron Cowen - Astronomy
Finding the star that was
Sifting through archival images, astronomers have identified the star whose explosive demise was recorded by telescopes last year.
By Ron Cowen