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Benchmarks: May 29, 1919: Solar eclipse "proves" relativity
By Nate BurgessOn May 29, 1919, the moon’s silhouette crept slowly over the sun, bringing premature night to observers in a broad swath of the Southern Hemisphere between South America and Africa. Few...
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Benchmarks: July 4, 1054: "Birth" of the Crab Nebula
On July 4, 1054, Chinese and Japanese astronomers observed a new, iridescent yellow point of light in the constellation Taurus. This “guest star,” said to be as bright as the moon, failed to disappear...
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Super-Earths: Mirrors of our world?
Fifty light-years from Earth, in the constellation Pegasus, burns a yellow star not unlike our sun. The star, called 51 Pegasi, was one of 142 stars under the watchful gaze of Swiss astronomers Michel...
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Online stargazing with GigaGalaxy Zoom
Blogging on EARTHIn need of a sense of perspective? The European Southern Observatory has a new way to look at the universe: with a zoom button.16 Sep 2009
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Down to Earth With: Nobel Prize winner Adam Riess
Astronomer Adam Riess and his team made a huge splash in 1998 when they announced the finding of dark energy. That work also included the discovery that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate....
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Astronomy under the ice: Scientists use Antarctic ice to study some of the...
Deep below the glacial surface at the South Pole, where the Antarctic ice is crystal clear yet pitch black, a 3-D array of more than 5,000 custom-built and precisely positioned sensors, each about the...
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North star loses mass but still shines bright
The North Star, the Pole Star, the Guiding Star, Polaris: Its many names reflect the many centuries humans have gazed northward to it for guidance. Because Earth’s North Pole is aligned with Polaris’...
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Venus in transit to the transit
5 June 2012 - Reader Elizabeth Talley snapped an iPhone photo of an ice ring around the sun yesterday afternoon in Port Charlotte, Fla., and unexpectedly also captured this image of Venus as it heads...
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Blogging on EARTH: Rarity the only reason for Venus transit fever?
If you read one or more stories leading up to yesterday’s transit of Venus across the face of the sun (or if you followed #VenusTransit on Twitter), you likely learned that the transit is akin to a...
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Mysterious rapid radio burst captured live
Last year, astronomers received a signal from the depths of the cosmos: a fleeting pulse of intense electromagnetic radiation known as a fast radio burst (or FRB). First discovered in 2007, these...
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Sun shapes Titan's atmospheric makeup
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has a thick atmosphere composed of 98 percent nitrogen and about 1.4 percent methane, as well as small amounts of other gases. In a new study published in the Journal of...
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MESSENGER mission ends with a bang, and more data
After 11 years in space and more than 4,100 laps around Mercury since entering orbit in 2011, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft was decommissioned in heroic fashion on April 30, slamming into the planet’s...
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Down to Earth With: Marc Kuchner
Marc Kuchner likes to joke that when he feels sociable at a party, he tells fellow guests that he is an astronomer. But when he wants to be left alone, he says, he tells them he is an astrophysicist....
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An aurora named Steve
In 2015 and 2016, more than 30 reports of odd, purple-hued ribbons of light over southern Canada popped up in forums on Aurorasaurus, a citizen science project funded by NASA and the National Science...
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Astronomers find missing half of the universe
Astronomers recently located half of the ordinary matter in the universe — a detection that has eluded scientists for decades.29 Oct 2018
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