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Your online destination for news articles on planets, cosmology, NASA, space missions, and more. You’ll also find information on how to observe upcoming visible sky events such as meteor showers, solar and lunar eclipses, key planetary appearances, comets, and asteroids.
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This week's news featured a hypergiant star up close, new results from Mercury, neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, and more.
Published: September 30, 2011 |
 | Scientists say the hazard to Earth could be somewhat less than previously thought.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 30, 2011 |
 | A principal purpose of the Bolshoi simulation is to compute and model the revolution of dark matter halos.
By University of California - Santa Cruz
Published: September 30, 2011 |
 | The intricate glowing shells of gas in Holmberg II were created by the energetic life cycles of many generations of stars.
Published: September 29, 2011 |
 | MESSENGER is imaging the innermost planet at unprecedented resolution and gathering data only possible from orbit.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 29, 2011 |
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The observations of the star are the first to reveal two almost perfectly spherical shells of dust around it.
By ESO, Garching, Germany
Published: September 28, 2011 |
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Higher above the planet’s surface, wind patterns resulting from solar heating and east to west zonal winds compete, possibly resulting in altered local temperatures and their variability over time.
By NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Published: September 28, 2011 |
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The impact of a coronal mass ejection resulted in strong compression of our planet’s magnetosphere.
By NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Published: September 27, 2011 |
 | OPERA results indicate that the neutrinos travel at a velocity 20 parts per million above the speed of light, nature's cosmic speed limit.
By CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Published: September 26, 2011 |
 | The precise reentry time and location of debris impacts have not been determined.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 26, 2011 |
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This week's news featured close-up views of an asteroid, a black hole's flaring jet, a satellite's reentry into Earth's atmosphere, and more.
Published: September 23, 2011 |
 | Planet Hunters analyzed real scientific data collected by NASA’s Kepler mission.
By Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut
Published: September 23, 2011 |
 | A huge doughnut-shaped cloud of water vapor created by the moon encircles Saturn.
By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
Published: September 22, 2011 |
 | Scientists unveiled a ready-made method for detecting the collision of stars with an elusive type of black hole.
By Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Published: September 22, 2011 |
 | Through WISE’s infrared observations, key measurements of the brightest inner part of a jet is possible for the first time.
By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 21, 2011 |
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The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite will break into pieces during reentry, but not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 21, 2011 |
 | In the nebula, hot newborn stars that formed from clouds of hydrogen gas shine brightly with ultraviolet light.
By ESO, Garching, Germany
Published: September 21, 2011 |
 | Using the properties of these blasts as a new distance-measuring method, scientists can examine the density of dark energy in various periods after the Big Bang.
By University of Warsaw, Poland
Published: September 20, 2011 |
 | While scientists are confident a large asteroid crashed into Earth, leading to the extinction of dinosaurs, they do not know exactly where the asteroid came from or how it made its way to our planet.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 20, 2011 |
 | It’s the weighty dark matter from Sagittarius that provides the initial push.
By University of California, Irvine
Published: September 19, 2011 |
 | The data obtained will help scientists determine the processes that formed Vesta’s striking features.
By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
Published: September 19, 2011 |
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This week's news featured a large exoplanet haul, the launch of a lunar mission, a Tatooine-like planetary system discovered, and more.
Published: September 16, 2011 |
 | The density of a stellar birth environment decides whether a star holds onto its companion or not.
By Royal Astronomical Society, United Kingdom
Published: September 16, 2011 |
 | The findings suggest that central black holes formed at an early stage in galaxy evolution.
By University of California - Santa Cruz
Published: September 16, 2011 |
 | Scientists uncover a planet that orbits around two stars.
By Carnegie Institution for Science, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 15, 2011 |
 | The new heavy-lift rocket will take humans far beyond Earth.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 15, 2011 |
 | Although the star CoRoT-2a may be frying exoplanet CoRoT-2b, the planet may also be affecting the behavior of the star that’s blasting it.
By Chandra X-ray Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Published: September 14, 2011 |
 | The space observatory data indicates that galaxy collisions played only a minor role in triggering star birth in the past, and that star formation depended more on the quantity of gas within a galaxy.
By ESA, Noordwijk, Netherlands
Published: September 14, 2011 |
 | The discovery includes an exceptionally rich population of super-Earths and Neptune-type planets hosted by stars very similar to our Sun.
By ESO, Garching, Germany
Published: September 13, 2011 |
 | Infrared data indicate a gigantic storm could be raging on a nearby brown dwarf.
By University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Published: September 13, 2011 |
 | The Fermi team released its second catalog of sources detected by the satellite’s Large Area Telescope, producing an inventory of 1,873 objects shining with the highest-energy form of light.
By Fermi Mission Press Office, Sonoma, California
Published: September 12, 2011 |
 | GRAIL will answer longstanding questions about the Moon and give scientists a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed.
By NASA/JPL
Published: September 12, 2011 |
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Detailed computer simulations indicate that violent mergers of neutron stars in binary systems likely are the main sources of the heaviest chemical elements in the universe.
By Max Planck Institute, Garching, Germany
Published: September 9, 2011 |
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This week's news featured the sharpest pictures of Apollo landing sites ever, an exoplanet discovered but not seen, late phase solar flares, and more.
Published: September 9, 2011 |
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Exoplanet Kepler-19c makes itself known by its influence on Kepler-19b, a world scientists can see as it passes in front of its home star.
By Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Published: September 9, 2011 |
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Solar Dynamics Observatory data indicates that radiation from solar flares continues for up to 5 hours beyond the peak event, with the total energy sometimes being greater than that of the initial flare.
By NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland
Published: September 8, 2011 |
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The images show distinct trails left in the Moon’s thin soil when the Apollo 12, 14, and 17 astronauts exited the lunar modules and explored on foot.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 8, 2011 |
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NGC 2100 in the Large Magellanic Cloud is often overlooked due to its proximity to the Tarantula Nebula.
By ESO, Garching, Germany
Published: September 7, 2011 |
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Research indicates that a type of magnetic wave that propels only electrons could be generated by magnetic reconnection far from Earth that then propagates rapidly away from the site of the explosion.
By ESA, Noordwijk, Netherlands
Published: September 7, 2011 |
 | Scientists hope the GRAIL mission will help them understand how the Moon formed and evolved over time.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 6, 2011 |
 | New research indicates that as some old stars with rapid spins begin to slow down, they explode as type Ia supernovae.
By Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Published: September 6, 2011 |
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This week's news featured the nearest supermassive black hole pair to the Milky Way, supersonic jets from young stars, a rare martian lake delta, a star that shouldn't exist, and more.
Published: September 2, 2011 |
 | The first rock the rover examined at Endeavour Crater has a composition similar to some volcanic rocks, but there’s much more zinc and bromine than typically seen.
By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 2, 2011 |
 | The delta structure provides a clear indication that liquid water flowed across the surface of Mars in the planet’s early history.
By ESA, Noordwijk, Netherlands
Published: September 2, 2011 |
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The astrophysicist is best-known as a guitarist and songwriter with the rock group Queen.
By David J. Eicher
Published: September 1, 2011 |
 | The black holes are likely the remnants of a merger of two galaxies of unequal mass a billion or more years ago.
By NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.
Published: September 1, 2011 |
 | The image was taken by the spacecraft’s camera, JunoCam, when the spacecraft was about 6 million miles (10 million kilometers) away.
By Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California
Published: September 1, 2011 |
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