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1999

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  • Is the 2-in-1 burster a masquerade?

    Sept. 17, 1999

    A NASA scientist finds a peculiar rapidly rotating neutron star - a pulsar - is acting quite a bit differently than it did in 1995, and is trying to understand why.

  • Why launch Chandra at night?

    July 23, 1999

    Blame Newton and Kepler: Chandra's beautiful early morning launch will place it into an orbit unlike that of NASA's other Great Observatories.

  • French Nobel Laureate turns back clock

    Oct. 12, 1999

    At any given spot along its path, the Aug. 11, 1999, total eclipse offered up to 2-1/2 spectacular minutes of total lunar coverage of the sun. But for two NASA researchers, the show's not over. They're just getting started probing a 50-year-old mystery.

  • The Great Leonid Meteor Stormlet of 1997

    July 16, 1999

    Newly released video shows a flurry of Leonids in 1997 that briefly rivaled the great meteor storm of 1966.

  • Planet in a Test Tube

    Aug. 16, 1999

    What do the racing winds on Jupiterand the snail's pace circulation of molten rock inside the Earth have in common? They're all fluids whose movements were studied in a "planet in a test tube" experiment flown aboard the Space Shuttle.

  • Scientists analyzing immense data haul from hurricanes

    Jan. 15, 1999

    The Convection and Moisture Experiment collected the most comprehensive data ever on individual storms of the 1998 season, and will provide new insight on killer storms leading to better predictions.

  • LightningLeaders Converge in Alabama

    May 24, 1999

    Topics slated for the upcoming 11th International Conference on Atmospheric Electricity include space-based Lightningdetection, purple sprites, Lightningas a precursor of severe weather, and more.

  • Cool microflares could be solar hot spots

    May 31, 1999

    One longstanding mystery of the sun is why its outer atmosphere - the corona - is 200 times hotter than its surface. Now, a trio of scientists says it's because the corona is heated by a constant series of mini-explosions, called microflares.

  • 1,000 Shares of Magnetar at 12-1/2!

    Dec. 8, 1999

    Here's a hot stock tip: the market, earthquakes, traffic jams, and magnetars follow the same power law. This oddity of the universe won't make you rich; it certainly can't be used to predict where the market is headed. But it follows a recent theory called self-organizing criticality.

  • Even the "soft" stars have a "hard" side

    Dec. 10, 1999

    Soft-gamma repeaters have a hard side. It's hard enough that they could almost be mistaken for the hard Gamma-ray Burststhat come from deep in the observable universe.