Space
Space dust annoys astronomers just as much as the household variety when it interferes with their observations of distant stars. And yet space dust also poses one of the great mysteries of astronomy.
When galaxies are born, do their stars form everywhere at once, or only within a small core region? Recent measurements of an international team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy provide the first concrete evidence that star-forming regions in infant galaxies are indeed small - but also hyperactive, producing stars at astonishingly high rates.
A spectacular new image of an unusual spiral galaxy in the Coma Galaxy Cluster has been created from data taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys on the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.
Future telescopes, with mirrors half the size of a football field, will need special components to deal with the light they collect.
In 1996, a 7-year-old boy in China bent over the eyepiece of a small telescope and saw something that would change his life--a comet of flamboyant beauty, bright and puffy with an active tail.
Funded by the National Science Foundation, Emmy award winning producer and writer Kris Koenig and the Instellar Studios production team traveled the globe, visiting the world's leading astronomers, cosmologists and observatories, to create 400 years of the Telescope.The visually stunning piece is the first science documentary to be filmed on 4K digital technology.
The development of NASA's next-generation crew launch vehicle, the Ares I rocket, took another step forward Thursday as Alliant Techsystems, or ATK, successfully tested a critical piece.
Recent images of Titan from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.
The team operating NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit plans diagnostic tests this week after Spirit did not report some of its weekend activities, including a request to determine its orientation after an incomplete drive.
Picture a tree in the forest. The tree "inhales" carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, transforming that greenhouse gas into the building materials and energy it needs to grow its branches and leaves.
Models of how Saturn and Jupiter formed may soon take on a different look.
NASA is using powerful computers and software programs to design the rocket that will carry crew and cargo to space after the space shuttle retires. But those computers will have their work checked the old-fashioned way with the first of several uncrewed demonstration launches beginning in 2009.
Astronauts spending months in space lose significant bone strength, making them increasingly at risk for fractures later in life.
From today's SpaceWeather.com e-mail.
The Antarctic Peninsula juts into the Southern Ocean, reaching farther north than any other part of the continent. The southernmost reach of global warming was believed to be limited to this narrow strip of land, while the rest of the continent was presumed to be cooling or stable. Not so.
