Galaxies

Recommendations from Scientific American

Over the coming month the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosetta mission will fire its main engines no less than eight times to tweak its interplanetary intercept course with Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko; eventually sidling up to the 4 kilometer wide cometary nucleus at about 7.9 meters per second in early August.

The smallest galaxies in the universe gave rise to an unexpectedly large proportion of stars. Karen Hopkin reports 

 

The European Southern Observatory broke ground June 19th to build the world's largest telescope atop the Cerro Armazones mountain in Chile. Clara Moskowitz reports   

 

Recently discovered galaxies shaped like jellyfish leave a long trail of hot gas and dust, victims of even hotter gas from their surrounding cluster of galaxies

 

In 2012, I asked LeVar Burton (who comandeered the Scientific American website as guest editor on Wednesday) if he would join me on a trip across time and space, to another star.

I have a prediction. There is a scientific hypothesis, formulated over 20 years ago, that we will one day look back on, when the evidence is in, and say “Of course that was right!

The release of a long-awaited National Academy of Sciences report on the state and future of the US space program has triggered wide-reaching commentary on what it means to be space-faring.

New observations of a behemoth collision reveal extreme physical forces at work
 

Two analyses suggest that the signal of big bang ripples announced earlier this year was too weak to be significant

Five remarkable stars on the other side of our galaxy promise new insight into the outer reaches of our home turf

A failed dwarf galaxy called the Smith Cloud apparently survived an ancient collision with the Milky Way because of a protective dark matter cloak. Clara Moskowitz reports