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Mapping Our Cosmic Main Street 27 Jun 2013 | 04:10 am
Milky Way seen from Kitt Peak National Observatory Despite the fact that we can peer outward with our telescopes into deep space for billions of light-years, our local celestial landscape is downrigh...
The Solar System Police 9 Feb 2013 | 11:04 pm
Once a planet Pluto was not the first planet to be demoted. Another solar system object was not only demoted from planetary status but got re-promoted later. Read about in my latest column in Natural...
Cosmic Cradles 26 Sep 2012 | 03:45 am
In 1995 Robert Williams had a crazy idea. Then director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he decided to use his allocated time on the Hubble Space Telescope to train its mirror on one tiny sp...
Remarkable Odyssey 19 Jun 2012 | 04:34 am
Jane Luu My congratulations go out to Jane Luu (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), David Jewitt (UCLA), and Michael Brown (Caltech) for winning this year's prestigious Kavli Prize in astrophysics, which includ...
Chasing Galaxies 16 May 2012 | 11:42 am
Beatrice Tinsley In this era that offers us such wondrous pictures of galaxies, showing their vivid evolution over the eons, it's easy to forget that astronomers once thought galaxies evolved relativ...
Curiouser and Curiouser 4 Apr 2012 | 11:24 am
The bright star Sirius and its tiny white-dwarf companion. (Credit: The McDonald Observatory) One hundred and fifty years ago, two astronomers in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, were testing the len...
An Unfettered Mind 27 Jan 2012 | 07:26 am
I have another book review out, published in the Washington Post on Sunday, January 22. This time the book is Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind, by science writer Kitty Ferguson. It's a new editio...
Radioactive 1 Dec 2011 | 02:50 pm
Check out my latest book review, published in the Washington Post on November 13. The book is titled Radioactive. It's an intriguing, visual work about Madame Curie and her husband Pierre. The autho...
Fried Egg Nebula 28 Sep 2011 | 10:00 pm
Does the universe want bacon with that? Fried Egg Nebula An international team of astronomers recently used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile to capture a unique pict...
Who Gave the Black Hole Its Name? 16 Aug 2011 | 04:56 am
John Wheeler in Black Hole, Nova Scotia, 1981 Book after book attributes the phrase "black hole" to the Princeton physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who in the 1960s re-energized the field of general ...
