A Planet Spotted As It Begins To Form

Scientists using the Keck telescope in Hawaii have found what may be a protoplanet, the youngest planet ever found
October 21, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

Name That Telescope

The Very Large Array needs a new, more exciting name
October 18, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

The First Supernova

In 185 A.D., someone in China looked up in the night sky and saw a new star
September 06, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

Faraway Planet is Blackest Yet Found

The planet, TrES-2b, is a gas giant about the size of Jupiter. But that's where the similarities end.
August 17, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

Ten Ways to Search for Intelligent Life in the Universe

If radio messages are out, try looking for asteroid mining, planetary pollutants, or alien artifacts here on Earth
August 03, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

A Quick Guide to Owning the Universe

If someone tries to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, you know it's a hoax. But what about a meteorite, moon or star?
May 25, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

A 3-D Map of the Universe, No Glasses Required

Investigators at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey track changes in the sky and some of the universe’s great mysteries
May 13, 2011 | By Ryan Kearney

A Quick Tour Through the Nature of our Universe

Astrophysicists like to talk about big concepts---like the nature of time, the universe, our very existence---but few make it understandable to the non-astrophysicist crowd. Usually these discussions leave my head spinning, unable to keep track of all of the concepts being flung my way. Which is ju...
May 09, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

Search for Alien Signals Goes on Hiatus

The SETI Institute announced this week that the Allen Telescope Array, with which the institute searches for signals of extra-terrestrials, has been temporarily taken offline due to lack of funding. Tom Pierson, the institute's CEO, wrote in a letter to supporters (pdf):Unfortunately, today’s gover...
April 27, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

Help Scientists Track Light Pollution By Looking At the Stars

In my neighborhood, some of the street lamps aim their light directly down on the sidewalk and road. Others spew their illumination in a sphere of light, wasting it as it streams into the sky. All those poorly aimed lights add up to 17 billion kilowatt-hours of lost energy each year, costing us aro...
March 21, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

Neutron Star May Have Superfluid at Its Core

The light from an exploding star traveled for more than 10,000 years across the galaxy before it reached the Earth some 330 years ago. (No one noticed it at the time or, at least, no one wrote it down.) Named for the constellation in which it appears, supernova remnant Cassiopeia A was once thought...
March 11, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

Edgar Allan Poe and the World of Astronomy

I've read my share of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but I was nonetheless intrigued by a caption in an article in the latest Smithsonian special issue, Mysteries of the Universe. It read: "The hollow Earth theory inspired authors from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Edgar Allan Poe." I knew that Poe, l...
January 19, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

NASA Picks Best & Worst Sci-Fi Movies. What Are Yours?

Scientists attending a recent meeting at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory picked their top seven worst and best science fiction movies of all time. Their lists (clips can be seen here):The Worst:1)  2012 (2009): Neutrinos from a solar flare heat up the Earth's core, setting off the end of life as w...
January 06, 2011 | By Sarah Zielinski

The Year in Science: A List of Lists

It's the end of the year, so you know what that means—it's time for the parade of "year in review" articles. Start with Smithsonian.com's Top 10 Stories of 2010, which features lots of science, and then move on to these others:* Discover magazine picked the top 100 stories of 2010 (and my brother w...
December 29, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

What Will Happen When We Find Alien Life?

No one knows when, or even if, we will discover alien life in the universe or what it might look like. But that hasn't stopped those who are looking from planning on that eventuality, as I discovered when reporting "Ready for Contact," one of the stories in Smithsonian's new special issue, Mysterie...
December 16, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Caroline Herschel: Assistant or Astronomer?

After a recent visit to the National Air and Space Museum's "Explore the Universe" exhibit, a local astronomy post-doc, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, wrote the following about one of the displays:magine my dismay when I got to the section about Caroline and William Herschel, a sister-brother team of a...
December 08, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

More Stars in the Universe

There may be as many as three times more stars in the universe as astronomers previously though, according to new study published by Nature.Pieter G. van Dokkum of Yale University and Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics looked for red dwarf stars—which are about 10 to ...
December 02, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Stars on the Move

Two thousand years ago Ptolemy listed Omega Centauri in his catalogue of stars. In 1677, Edmund Halley (of comet fame) named it a nebula. But we now know that Omega Centauri is actually a globular cluster, a swarm of almost 10 million stars that all orbit around a common point. (That point may be a...
November 05, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Picture of the Week: The Witch Head Nebula

The Witch Head Nebula—formally named IC 2118—sits in the constellation Orion about 1,000 light years from Earth. (In case you're having a hard time seeing the witch, her face is in profile facing to the right.) That bright blue star in the center of the image is Rigel, Orion's brightest star and th...
October 29, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

The Georgian Planet: A Case of Clever Marketing

On March 31, 1781, William Herschel, a German musician and composer, looked through a homemade 7-foot-long telescope in his back garden in Bath, England and saw something odd. He thought it was a comet, but it didn't act quite like other comets. And when scientists of the time calculated the object...
October 26, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

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