14-08-08 Cosmology Christopher Buckley Most days I find myself considering the encrypted clouds, though, while everything is blue through the boughs of heaven, I know the stars will hardly spell out our names in specks across the enormity（巨大，暴行） of ni...

14-08-08 Fantasy/Sci-Fi Laura Kasischke The broom closet to another planet. The impending（即将发生的） planetary disaster. The children in their maniac（发狂的） trances（恍惚，出神） . The rockets. The neighbors. The openmouthed spectators. The boy tumblin...

14-07-10 There are billions of stars and planets in the universe. A star is glowing sphere of gas, while planets like Earth are made up of solids. The planets are formed in dust clouds that swirled around a newly formed star. Dust grains are composed of elem...

14-07-04 Determining the age of stars has long been a challenge for astronomers. In experiments published in the journal Science, researchers at KU Leuven's Institute for Astronomy show that 'infant' stars can be distinguished from 'adolescent' stars by meas...

14-05-07 Neutron stars, the extraordinarily dense stellar bodies created when massive stars collapse, are known to host the strongest magnetic fields in the universe -- as much as a billion times more powerful than any human-made electromagnet. But some neut...

14-02-24 Using a telescope installed at the driest place on earth -- Ridge A in Antarctica -- a UNSW-led team of researchers has identified a giant gas cloud which appears to be in an early stage of formation. Giant clouds of molecular gas -- the most massiv...

14-02-13 Astronomers know that while large stars can end their lives as violently cataclysmic supernovae, smaller stars end up as planetary nebulae（行星状星云） -- colourful, glowing clouds of dust and gas. In recent decades these nebulae, once thought to b...

14-01-22 A breakthrough using data from the Gaia-ESO project has provided evidence backing up theoretically predicted divisions in the chemical composition of the stars that make up the Milky Way's disc -- the vast collection of giant gas clouds and billions...

14-01-13 An international team of astronomers has discovered a surprising new class of hypervelocity（超高速） stars -- solitary stars moving fast enough to escape the gravitational grasp of the Milky Way galaxy. The discovery of this new set of hypervelocit...

14-01-13 A photogenic and favorite target for amateur astronomers, the full beauty of nearby barred spiral galaxy M83 is unveiled in all of its glory in this Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image. The vibrant magentas and blues reveal the galaxy is ablaze with...