Jupiter and Saturn’s rings show echoes of comet collisions
In August of 2009, the Cassini orbiter was in place as Saturn reached a point where its rings were illuminated by the Sun edge-on. The images it captured showed a regular, repeating pattern of bright and dark stripes...
Feature: Planetary Exploration 2013-2022: Scientists are ready, what about you?
On Monday, March 7th, NASA and NSF received the results of the Planetary Science Decadal Survey, which recommended planetary exploration priorities to NASA and the NSF for the 2013-2022 decade. The highlights of the recommendat...
Where’s Tyche, the 10th 9th planet? Getting the full story
On February 14th, the UK's Daily Mail reported the possible discovery of a planet four times bigger than Jupiter and lurking in the outer solar system. From there, the story quickly spread like a wildfire on the ...
NASA: Kepler candidates include dozens of Earth-sized planets
When NASA scheduled a press briefing to talk about Kepler results, the safe assumption was that the focus would be on the system it had spotted with six planets orbiting a single star. That...
NASA spots six planets in tight orbits around sun-like star
Today, the team running NASA's Kepler observatory is announcing the largest collection of planets yet spotted orbiting a single star. That star, now called Kepler-11, hosts at least a half-dozen planets, most in orbits...
Macworld Expo 2011: Vito Technology updates the Walk apps
Russian company Vito Technology was in one of the booths around the Mobile App Showcase at Macworld 2011 last week, and they kindly sat down to show off new versions of their apps, all coming up in the next month or so as free updates on the App Store...
Gravity’s lenses may skew surveys of early galaxies
Astronomers have shown that, at high red shifts, gravitational lensing might have a dominant effect on the number of galaxies counted in upcoming surveys. As astronomers peer deeper into the sky, they will have...
Interior of Moon imaged using 40-year-old data
Old data can hold new information when viewed with a fresh pair of eyes. Researchers have used data originally collected
during the Apollo missions to the Moon to get a
picture of its interior that was previously unavailable...
Earth + 0.4: smallest exoplanet spotted
Today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, NASA's Kepler team announced the discovery of the smallest exoplanet yet identified. The planet, called Kepler-10b, is only 1.4 times the diameter of the Eart...
Crab Nebula gets erratic with gamma-ray outbursts
The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova observed by Chinese astronomers in 1064, making it one of the more recent remnants available to study. Its core contains a rapidly spinning pulsar, which...
Plasma jets make Sun’s corona so much hotter than the surface
The Sun's core is millions of degrees, while the solar surface is a balmy 5800 kelvin. But travel to the Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, and it heats up to millions of degrees again. The...
Galaxy collisions may not fuel black holes after all
Evidence has mounted that most galaxies harbor enormous black holes at their centers. Most of these, like the Milky Way's, are relatively quiet. But a few end up swallowing prodigious amounts of matter from their surroundings a......
