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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Astronomy

    Model Tracks Storms from the Sun

    Teams of astronomers have developed a reliable method for predicting the time it takes for solar storms to arrive at Earth and have gathered observations confirming a model of how the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, manages to store up enough magnetic energy to induce these upheavals.

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  2. Astronomy

    Runaway black hole

    Observing a black hole and its visible companion star caroming through our galaxy, astronomers have found the best evidence to date that stellar-mass black holes are born during supernova explosions.

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  3. Astronomy

    News of the Early Universe: Findings from the cosmic microwave background

    The most detailed snapshots so far of the infant universe confirm that the cosmos consists mostly of mystery material, called dark energy, that accelerates the universe's expansion.

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  4. Astronomy

    News of the Early Universe: Findings from the cosmic microwave background

    The most detailed snapshots so far of the infant universe confirm that the cosmos consists mostly of mystery material, called dark energy, that accelerates the universe's expansion.

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  5. Planetary Science

    Fresh crater found on lunar images

    Scientists analyzing images of the moon's surface taken from lunar orbit believe they've identified the crater that formed when a small asteroid slammed into the moon almost 5 decades ago.

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  6. Planetary Science

    Fresh crater found on lunar images

    Scientists analyzing images of the moon's surface taken from lunar orbit believe they've identified the crater that formed when a small asteroid slammed into the moon almost 5 decades ago.

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  7. Astronomy

    Black holes and galaxies may grow up together

    Astronomers have new and, for the first time, quantitative evidence that bigger black holes reside at the centers of bigger galaxies.

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  8. Planetary Science

    Martian History: Weathering a new notion

    Researchers suggest that intermittent impacts by huge asteroids and comets some 3.5 billion years ago profoundly influenced the landscape of Mars.

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  9. Astronomy

    Sizing up small stars

    Astronomers have for the first time measured with high precision the size of a small star, Proxima Centauri, the known star nearest to the solar system.

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  10. Astronomy

    Milky Way’s Last Major Merger

    Astronomers have found new evidence supporting the view that the Milky Way and many other spiral galaxies suffered their last major collision billions of years ago.

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  11. Planetary Science

    X rays reveal Eros’ primitive nature

    Aided by a blast of X rays from the sun, a spacecraft orbiting the near-Earth asteroid 433 Eros has gathered preliminary evidence that the rock is a primitive relic, apparently unchanged since the birth of the solar system.

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  12. Astronomy

    Survey confirms composition of the cosmos

    A team of astronomers announced this week that after measuring the redshifts of 100,000 galaxies, they have new evidence for what makes up most of the mass of the universe.

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