Space
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Astronomy
X-ray satellite goes the distance
Using the sharp X-ray eye of an orbiting observatory, astronomers have employed a novel method to measure distance within the Milky Way.
- Astronomy
Balloon Sounds Out the Early Universe
A balloon-borne experiment circling Antarctica has measured the curvature of the universe and revealed that it's perfectly flat.
- 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.
- Astronomy
Observatory on a suicide mission
Fearing that its 9-year-old workhorse, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, could plunge uncontrollably through the atmosphere if one more of its gyroscopes fails, NASA has decided to crash the spacecraft into the Pacific Ocean in early June.
- Astronomy
Are solar eruptions triggered a loopy way?
Astronomers have identified a new solar mechanism that may explain some coronal mass ejections.
- Astronomy
Black holes and their galaxies: A closer link
Supermassive black holes and the galaxies they inhabit appear to grow up together.
- 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.
- 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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- 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.
- Astronomy
Craft spies new class of gamma-ray sources
Roughly half the 120 unidentified sources of high-energy gamma-ray emissions in the Milky Way—those at midgalactic latitudes—may comprise a new class of objects and originate from a belt of massive stars that lies only a few hundred light-years from the solar system.
- 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.
