Royal Observatory Photography Prize

The Royal Observatory, in Greenwich, England, has announced its 2010 Astronomy Photographer of the Year. Tom Lowe won with this photo, Blazing Bristlecone. Though he won, Lowe wasn't perfectly satisified with his photo. He said:If I could change anything about this photo, it would be the artificial...
September 17, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

A Solar System Rich in Planets

If you're looking for life outside of our solar system, it makes sense to look for solar systems and planets like our own. You'd want a solar system with a Sun like ours, with lots of planets orbiting around it. One of those planets should be the size of Earth and traveling at a distance around its...
August 26, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Richard Branson on Space Travel

The billionaire entertainment mogul talks about the future of transportation and clean energy
August 2010 | By Megan Gambino

Asteroid Hunters

Astronomers are determined to protect human beings from inanimate outer space invaders
August 2010 | By Robert Irion

Music of the Heavenly Spheres (Part 2) — Holst, Haydn, Handel and More…

Apollo with his famous lyre is the Greek god of music. This son of Zeus was also closely associated with the Sun and is often assumed to be the Sun god Helios by a different name. In other polytheistic circles, none of the gods of music in Hindu, Norse, Japanese or Egyptian mythologies were associa...
June 23, 2010 | By Brandon Springer

The Birth of Saturn's Moonlets

Saturn has two main types of moons: the first are regular moons, like Enceladus, that are similar to moons around other giant planets and orbit in Saturn's equatorial plane. The others are tiny, icy moonlets that reside on the outer edges of Saturn's rings. They weren't discovered until about six y...
June 14, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Rare Meteor Event Inspired Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass includes the poem "Year of Meteors, (1859-60)" in which he documents many events in those years—including the hanging of abolitionist John Brown and the election of Abraham Lincoln. He also includes descriptions of a comet and meteors:Nor the comet that came unannounc...
June 07, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

What Does an Eclipse Look Like from Space?

If you have no knowledge of how the Earth and Sun and Moon move, an eclipse is a scary thing. With no warning, the Sun goes black and your world turns dark. An eclipse, however, is really just the shadow of the Moon passing over the Earth, as seen in the above photo (a NASA image taken by an astron...
May 28, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe

At the South Pole, astronomers try to unravel a force greater than gravity that will determine the fate of the cosmos
April 2010 | By Richard Panek

Worst NASA Posters Ever

NASA is usually a master of the art of self promotion, which is why I'm a bit perplexed by this page of downloadable posters promoting NASA manned space missions. The most innocuous ones are simply boring, with proud astronauts grouped in front of a space shuttle or some stars. (No one looks good i...
March 29, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Where Is the Center of the Universe?

This seems like it should be a simple question: Where is the center of the universe? But as Varoujan Gorjian of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains in this video from the Spitzer Science Center, this question doesn't have an easy answer. Looking out from Earth, it appears that we're sitting a...
March 08, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Stephen Hawking's Initials in the Big Bang's Echo

Scientists have released their latest, most detailed map of the cosmic microwave background--that faint glow of radiation left over from the Big Bang--and Stephen Hawking's initials are still there. The S and H have been spotted in previous versions of the image, which is sometimes known as WMAP fo...
February 09, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

An Eclipse in Your Pocket

When you think about it, American money is kind of boring. It's fairly drab in color, and rarely have people other than U.S. presidents been found on our dollars or coins. Other countries put more interesting people, like scientists, on their money, often using a rainbow of colors. Even more daring...
January 29, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Black Hole Rap

I've been reading all the news about the Large Hadron Collider for months, but apparently I missed the most important bit about the LHC: the project has its very own rapper, ATLAS e-News science writer Katherine McAlpine, a.k.a. "AlpineKat." Her Large Hadron Rap went viral, with more than 5.5 milli...
January 25, 2010 | By Sarah Zielinski

Nine Science Stories You Should Have Read This Year

It's also been a good year for science stories in Smithsonian magazine, including our special issue, Exploring the Frontiers of Science. Here are nine you should read if you haven't already:Gene Therapy in a New Light: A husband-and-wife team's experimental genetic treatment for blindness is renewi...
December 30, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Five Things to Keep You Occupied Over the Holiday Weekend

One, the known universe, courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History (HT: Slog):Two, check out Geeks Are Sexy for 5 ways to geek it up over the holidays.Three, speaking of geeks, you can weigh in on whether or not we should ban the labels "geek" and "nerd".Four, GrrlScientist reprises her cl...
December 23, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Science Books for Kids

For weeks, Smithsonian editor Kathleen Burke has been sifting through piles of kids' books to put together her annual list of notable books for children, now online. I dove in behind her to pull out some of the wonderful science books that I would have loved to have read when I was young:Almost Ast...
December 21, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

Eight Awful Movies for Science in the 2000s

Even a bad movie can be enjoyable under the right circumstances. Sometimes, though, you wish you hadn't bothered. Here are eight clunkers from the last decade: Erin Brockovich (2000): Julia Roberts won an Academy Award for her work in this true-life story of a woman who fought against polluters in ...
December 17, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

The Big Dipper's Newest Star

If you can only spot one constellation, it's probably the Big Dipper. Other than being easily recognizable, the Big Dipper is special because it contains one of the first known binary star systems. The star in the crook of the handle was found to actually be two stars around 1617 by Benedetto Caste...
December 14, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

A Musical Interlude

One more suggestion that I left off of Tuesday's holiday gift list: The band They Might Be Giants released their album "Here Comes Science" earlier this year. And here are videos from three of the songs, "Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)," "Meet the Elements" and "Sci...
December 10, 2009 | By Sarah Zielinski

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