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Astronomy

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New Exoplanet Search Strategy Claims First Discovery

February 18, 2020

By watching for a special kind of flare, astronomers have identified the fingerprints of an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star.

The Age of Interstellar Visitors

January 29, 2020

As astronomers get better at finding the comets and asteroids of other stars, they’ll learn more about the universe and our place in it.

Are Saturn’s Rings Really as Young as the Dinosaurs?

November 21, 2019

A surprisingly youthful estimate of the age of the rings has stirred a backlash.

Q&A

Virginia Trimble Has Seen the Stars

November 11, 2019

How a young celebrity became one of the first female astronomers at Caltech, befriended Richard Feynman, and ended up the world’s foremost chronicler of the science of the night sky.

Physics Nobel Honors Early Universe and Exoplanet Discoveries

October 8, 2019

The astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz won half of the prize for their 1995 discovery of a Jupiter-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The cosmologist James Peebles won the other half for work exploring the structure of the universe.

Long-Lived Stellar Blast Kindles Hope of a Supernova We’ve Never Seen Before

September 12, 2019

A giant star’s death throes may offer the first evidence of a pair-instability supernova, and a glimpse of the first stars in the universe.

Cosmologists Debate How Fast the Universe Is Expanding

August 8, 2019

New measurements could upend the standard theory of the cosmos that has reigned since the discovery of dark energy 21 years ago.

Sun’s Puzzling Plasma Recreated in a Laboratory

July 29, 2019

For the first time, researchers have created a scale model of the twisting loops of the sun’s magnetic field.

Big Black Holes Found in the Smallest Galaxies

July 23, 2019

Tiny, dim “dwarf” galaxies have been found to hide gas-spewing black holes.

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