A newly discovered exoplanet is the first such alien world to resemble the planets in our own solar system, researchers announced Wednesday.
Mar 17, 2010 - 1:26:31 PM
Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known. The discovery, based largely on observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will provide a better understanding of the roots of our universe, and how the very first black holes, galaxies and stars came to be.
Mar 17, 2010 - 11:40:33 AM
Giant filaments of cold dust stretching through our Galaxy are revealed in a new image from ESA's Planck satellite. Analysing these structures could help to determine the forces that shape our Galaxy and trigger star formation.
Mar 17, 2010 - 11:38:47 AM
A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars. The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.
Mar 17, 2010 - 11:36:32 AM
New thermal images from powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter's Great Red Spot, enabling scientists to make the first detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system.
Mar 17, 2010 - 10:50:22 AM
Another beauty, Dione and Titan make a smiling pair of crescent moons. This image was taken on March 12, 2010 and received on Earth March 13, 2010.
Mar 17, 2010 - 10:48:25 AM
The birth of the most massive stars - those ten to a hundred times the mass of the Sun --has posed an astrophysical riddle for decades. Massive stars are dense enough to fuse hydrogen while they're still gathering material from the gas cloud, so it was a mystery why their brilliant radiation does not heat the infalling gas and blow it away.
Mar 16, 2010 - 10:33:24 AM
An international team led by Yale University has, for the first time, measured the mass of a type of supernova thought to belong to a unique subclass and confirmed that it surpasses what was believed to be an upper mass limit.
Mar 16, 2010 - 10:12:09 AM
Images from the recent flyby of Phobos, on 7 March 2010, are released today. The images show Mars' rocky moon in exquisite detail, with a resolution of just 4.4 metres per pixel. They show the proposed landing sites for the forthcoming Phobos-Grunt mission.
Mar 16, 2010 - 9:20:11 AM
A star is hurtling towards us. It will almost certainly clip the outskirts of the solar system and send comets towards Earth - though not for a while.
Mar 15, 2010 - 12:44:31 PM
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida - California-based SpaceX said it conducted a successful engine test for its Falcon 9 launch vehicle on Saturday, marking a key milestone on the way to the inaugural launch of a commercial rocket that President Barack Obama hopes will one day ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
Mar 14, 2010 - 11:03:38 AM
A new study reports that the top of the gigantic conveyor belt of plasma moving inside the sun has been running at record-high speeds for the past five years.
Mar 13, 2010 - 12:32:01 PM
Space physicists from the University of Leicester are part of an international team that has identified the impact of the Sun on Mars' atmosphere.
Mar 13, 2010 - 12:21:23 PM
A current shock wave of charged particles from a solar storm is hitting the Earth's protective magnetic bubble, it creates highly energetic particles dubbed "killer electrons" that can be dangerous to spacecraft, satellites and cause extreme weather events on Earth.
Mar 12, 2010 - 10:49:15 AM
A solar stream of charged particles is buffeting Earth's magnetic field and stirring up geomagnetic activity around the Arctic Circle. "On March 11th," reports Paul McCrone, "the DMSP F-18 weather satellite recorded a dramatic auroral event over northern Canada."
Mar 12, 2010 - 10:48:13 AM
PASADENA, California - By precisely tracking NASA's Cassini spacecraft on its low swoops over Saturn's moon Titan, scientists have determined the distribution of materials in the moon's interior. The subtle gravitational tugs they measured suggest the interior has been too cold and sluggish to split completely into separate layers of ice and rock.
Mar 12, 2010 - 10:33:41 AM
