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We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

  1. Astronomy

    Milky Way feasts on its neighbors

    Three new studies reveal that Earth's home galaxy indulged in cannibalism to assemble its visible halo, the diffuse distribution of stars that surrounds the dense core and disk of the Milky Way.

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  2. Astronomy

    There’s life in the old galaxies yet

    An unexpectedly large number of supermassive black holes in old galaxy clusters suggests these elderly groupings of galaxies aren't as quiescent as had been expected.

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  3. Astronomy

    Are solar eruptions triggered a loopy way?

    Astronomers have identified a new solar mechanism that may explain some coronal mass ejections.

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  4. Astronomy

    Black holes and their galaxies: A closer link

    Supermassive black holes and the galaxies they inhabit appear to grow up together.

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  5. Planetary Science

    Rocks on the ice

    Pristine fragments of a meteorite that fell January 18 in the frozen Yukon and that remained frozen until they were delivered to a NASA laboratory may reveal much about the earliest days of the solar system.

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  6. Planetary Science

    A Comet’s Long Tail Tickles Ulysses

    Stretching more than half a billion kilometers, the ion tail that Comet Hyakutake flaunted when it passed near the sun in 1996 is the longest ever recorded and suggests that otherwise invisible comets could be detected by searching for their tails.

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  7. Planetary Science

    Reviewers see red over recent Mars programs

    NASA's two most recent missions to Mars failed because they were underfunded, managed by inexperienced people, and insufficiently tested, according to a report released March 28.

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  8. Astronomy

    Big Bang Confirmed: Seeing twists and turns of primordial light

    The latest observations of the cosmic microwave background reveal that photons from adjacent patches of the sky have slightly different polarizations.

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  9. Astronomy

    Less Massive than Saturn?

    Astronomers pass a milestone in the search for new worlds.

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  10. Astronomy

    Found: Gamma-ray background information

    Resolving a 30-year-old mystery, astronomers say they have identified the source of the faint, high-energy glow of radiation known as the gamma-ray background.

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  11. Astronomy

    X-ray telescope vanishes

    Astro-E, a Japanese X-ray observatory, fell back to Earth and burned up just after launch on Feb. 9.

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  12. Planetary Science

    Unveiling Mars’ watery secret

    A new gravity map of Mars has revealed a network of buried channels that billions of years ago may have been on the surface and helped carry water to fill an ancient ocean.

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