From planet to plutoid.
Pluto and its kind get new name [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Pluto now has a family of its own, after astronomers have struggled for years to give it a place among its celestial brethren. The International Astronomical Union announced June 11 that it has accepted...

Asteroid named after Filipino scientist Kintanar.
Byline: EDWIN L. AGUIRRE & IMELDA B. JOSON CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, USA -- An asteroid circling the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and measuring 4 to 9 kilometers in diameter has recently been named after a 77-year-old Filipino scientist and former director of the Philippine...

Defining planethood.
Textbooks are supposed to be full of facts, but you can't always believe what you read. Especially when the topic is Pluto. Last August, after 75 years of planethood, Pluto lost its status when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) came up with a new definition of what...

Dead--but not duds: white dwarfs shed light on physics and the fate of the cosmos.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Amid the liveliest stars in the cosmos lie stellar corpses. Of these dead stars, the most abundant are white dwarfs--stars that in their prime were similar to the sun. These dense corpses foreshadow what will become of most of the stars in the universe. ...

Celestial Explorations.
Byline: Debina Chattopadhyay Though the study of the atmosphere and space is one of the oldest sciences, man has never ceased to be curious about stellar and galactic properties and activities. Spearheaded by the US and the USSR, astronomical research has always been an important area of...

Mission to the forgotten planets: thanks to the Dawn probe, scientists will finally get a close look at two giant time capsules from the birth of the solar system.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sometime in August 2011, a boxy space probe called Dawn will settle into orbit around one of the most underrated and overlooked objects in the solar system, a giant oblong asteroid named Vesta. After lingering for almost 10 months of study, Dawn will depart for...

Death by cosmic pinball.
The dinosaurs' fate may have been sealed by a piece of shrapnel from a cosmic collision that occurred long before the asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. Poring through a database of objects in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, scientists at the Southwest...

Robotics.
Background Robotics is the science of building robots. Robotic experts design robots primarily to improve the quality of industrial production. The word "robot" derives from the Czechoslovakian word "robota" meaning "slave-like" or "forced work." Use of Robots The first-generation hydraulic robots were large...

Meteors.
Background As asteroids (as-ter-oids) and comets (com-ets) orbit the Sun, they can leave pieces of rocks, dust and fragments trailing behind. Even ejected rock particles from planets and the Moon float out in space. When the Earth's orbit passes near or intersects these cosmic highways of space...

Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune!
Eight planets orbit, or revolves around the sun. The planets and the sun are parts of our solar system. Which planet is shown here? Explore Our Solar System The sun is a star. It is a giant ball of hot gas. ...