Space

Astronomy

Age of the universe: A new determination

Analyzing the faint glow left over from the Big Bang, scientists report measuring the age of the cosmos with unprecedented accuracy—14 billion years, accurate to within half a billion years.

Astronomy

Young stars shed light on young sun

If our own sun had been as active in its youth as is a group of young sunlike stars recently observed with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, it could account for the abundance of several isotopes, such as aluminum-26, calcium-41, and beryllium-10 found in meteorites.

Astronomy

Asteroid studies reveal new puzzles

Belying the image of an asteroid as a bare rock, a detailed study of the asteroid 433 Eros reveals that many of its crater floors and depressions are coated with fine dust and nearly half of the largest rocks strewn across the asteroid's surface represent material blasted from a single crater.

Astronomy

Moon plume breaks the record

The Galileo spacecraft has found the tallest plume seen so far on Jupiter's moon Io, the only volcanically active moon known in the solar system.

Astronomy

New alcohol added to space-stuff catalog

Researchers have discovered the molecule vinyl alcohol in space.

Astronomy

Distant spiral galaxy poses for Gemini

The newly operating Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph instrument on the Gemini North Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, took a high-resolution composite photograph of a galaxy 30 million light-years away.

Astronomy

A Cosmic Crisis?

Astronomers appear to have a heavenly crisis on their hands, and it concerns material they can't even detect.

Astronomy

Faint body may be galaxy building block

Using a cosmic zoom lens, astronomers may have found one of the first building blocks of a galaxy in the universe.

Astronomy

Probe’s comet encounter yields close-ups

A crippled NASA probe successfully navigated close enough to Comet Borrelly to capture and beam home black-and-white and infared images of its nucleus and new data about ions and other particles that radiate from it.

Astronomy

After a failure, a new craft to sail

Despite the July 20 failure of its mission to test the unfurling of a solar sail in a suborbital trajectory, the Planetary Society announced plans in late August to conduct a second test of a sail-propelled craft.

Astronomy

A meteorite’s pristine origins

A rare, carbon-rich meteorite that fell into a frozen Canadian lake last year ranks as the most pristine of such specimens ever found.

Astronomy

Gravity’s lens: Finding a sextet of images

Astronomers have for the first time found a gravitational lens in which the image of a distant galaxy has been split into six distinct images.