13-01-28 The sun's energy is virtually limitless, but harnessing its electricity with today's single-crystal silicon solar cells is extremely expensive -- 10 times pricier than coal, according to some estimates. Organic solar cells -- polymer solar cells tha...

13-01-09 Comets trailing wispy（纤细的） tails across the night sky are a beautiful byproduct of our solar system's formation, icy leftovers from 4.6 billion years ago when the planets coalesced from rocky rubble. The discovery by astronomers at the Universi...

13-01-05 The protoplanet（原行星） Vesta has been witness to an eventful past: images taken by the framing camera onboard NASA's space probe Dawn show two enormous craters in the southern hemisphere. The images were obtained during Dawn's year-long visit to...

12-12-26 Scattered around the Milky Way are stars that resemble our own sun -- but a new study is finding that any planets orbiting those stars may very well be hotter and more dynamic（有活力的） than Earth. That's because the interiors of any terrestrial p...

12-12-13 Prices for solar modules -- the part of solar panels that produce electricity -- will continue to fall, in line with the long-term trend since 1980, according to a survey of experts by Near Zero, , a nonprofit energy research organization. However,...

12-11-14 Tens of thousands of tourists and astronomers gathered in northern Australia to glimpse a rare total solar eclipse. 数以万计的游客和天文爱好者齐聚澳大利亚北部地区观赏一场罕见的日全食。 The eclipse, which occurs when the moon passes between the Earth...

12-11-07 Tokelau has become the first territory able to meet all its electricity needs with solar power, officials say. 托克劳官员称，托克劳成为世界上首个完全利用太阳能供电的国家。 The South Pacific territory - comprising the three atolls（环礁） of Atafu, N...

12-11-05 Some 4.567 billion years ago, our solar system's planets spawned from an expansive disc of gas and dust rotating around the sun. While similar processes are witnessed in younger solar systems throughout the Milky Way, the formative stages of our own...

12-11-01 Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic（光电的） devices today. The results are published in the Oct. 31 online edition of the j...

12-10-25 ESA's quartet of satellites studying Earth's magnetosphere（磁气圈） , Cluster, has discovered that our protective magnetic bubble lets the solar wind in under a wider range of conditions than previously believed. Earth's magnetic field is our plane...