| New Method of Finding Planets Scores its First Discovery
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May 13, 2013: Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars).
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| Two Water Worlds for the Price of One
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April 18, 2013: In our solar system, only one planet is blessed with an ocean: Earth. Our home world is a rare, blue jewel compared to the deserts of Mercury, Venus and Mars. But what if our Sun had not one but two habitable ocean worlds?
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| New Insights on How Spiral Galaxies Get Their Arms
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April 02, 2013: Spiral galaxies are some of the most beautiful and photogenic residents of the universe. Our own Milky Way is a spiral. Our solar system and Earth reside somewhere near one of its filamentous arms.
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| Astronomers Discover a New Kind of Supernova
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March 26, 2013: Until now, supernovas came in two main "flavors." A core-collapse supernova is the explosion of a star about 10 to 100 times as massive as our sun, while a Type Ia supernova is the complete disruption of a tiny white dwarf.
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| Pan-STARRS Finds a "Lost" Supernova
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March 07, 2013: The star Eta Carinae is ready to blow. 170 years ago, this 100-solar-mass object belched out several suns' worth of gas in an eruption that made it the second-brightest star after Sirius. That was just a precursor to the main event, since it will eventually go supernova.
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| Supermassive Black Hole Spins Super-Fast
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February 27, 2013: Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across - eight times the distance from Earth to the Moon - spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light.
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| Future Evidence for Extraterrestrial Life Might Come from Dying Stars
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February 25, 2013: Even dying stars could host planets with life - and if such life exists, we might be able to detect it within the next decade. This encouraging result comes from a new theoretical study of Earth-like planets orbiting white dwarf stars.
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| Earth-like Planets Are Right Next Door
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February 06, 2013: Using publicly available data from NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) have found that six percent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets.
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| 2012 Comet Awards Announced
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January 29, 2013: The Minor Planet Center, located at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Mass., has announced the recipients of the 2012 Edgar Wilson Award for the discovery of comets by amateurs.
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| Space Instrument Adds Big Piece to the Solar Corona Puzzle
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January 23, 2013: The Sun's visible surface, or photosphere, is 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. As you move outward from it, you pass through a tenuous layer of hot, ionized gas or plasma called the corona.
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| First "Bone" of the Milky Way Identified
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January 08, 2013: Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy - a pinwheel-shaped collection of stars, gas and dust. It has a central bar and two major spiral arms that wrap around its disk. Since we view the Milky Way from the inside, its exact structure is difficult to determine.
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| At Least One in Six Stars Has an Earth-sized Planet
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January 07, 2013: The quest for a twin Earth is heating up. Using NASA's Kepler spacecraft, astronomers are beginning to find Earth-sized planets orbiting distant stars.
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| NASA Funds SAO Instrument to Track North American Air Pollution
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November 09, 2012: The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory has been awarded a NASA project to build the Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution (TEMPO) instrument.
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| Galactic Thief: "I Would Have Gotten Away With It, If It Weren't for Those Meddling Astronomers"
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October 29, 2012: One of the closest galaxies to the Milky Way almost got away with theft. However, new simulations convicted the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) of stealing stars from its neighbor, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC).
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| Split-Personality Elliptical Galaxy Holds a Hidden Spiral
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October 22, 2012: Most big galaxies fit into one of two camps: pinwheel-shaped spiral galaxies and blobby elliptical galaxies. Spirals like the Milky Way are hip and happening places, with plenty of gas and dust to birth new stars.
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