San Marcos -- Famed Norwegian artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) has long been a favorite of Texas State University-San Marcos faculty members Don Olson and Russell Doescher. In 2003, the physics department researchers connected the blood-red sky of Munch's anguished masterpiece "The Scream" to the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa on the other side of the globe. They turned their attention to Munch's beloved painting "Girls on the Pier" in 2006, firmly identifying the yellow orb in the sky as the Moon -- not the Sun, as some had theorized -- and used simple physics to explain why the Moon cast no reflection on the waters.

Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration Larger image - Larger image (unlabeled)

With NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, astronomers now are getting their best look at those whirling stellar cinders known as pulsars.

An international team of astronomers led by researchers from the Max-Planck-Institut fur Radioastronomie (MPIfR) has unveiled a new survey giving an unprecedented view of the inner regions of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust -- the potential birthplaces of new stars.

Favorable chemistry and episodes with thin films of liquid water during ongoing, long-term climate cycles may sometimes make the area where NASA's Phoenix Mars mission landed last year a favorable environment for microbes.

The Helix Nebula, NGC 7293, is not only one of the most interesting and beautiful planetary nebulae; it is also one of the closest nebulae to Earth, at a distance of only 710 light years (219 pc) away. A new image, taken with an infrared camera on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, shows tens of thousands of previously unseen comet-shaped knots inside the nebula. The sheer number of knots -- more than have ever been seen before -- looks like a massive fireworks display in space.

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has transmitted its first images since reaching the moon on June 23. The spacecraft's two cameras, collectively known as the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, were activated June 30. The cameras are working well and have returned images of a region in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium (Sea of Clouds). As the moon rotates beneath LRO, LROC gradually will build up photographic maps of the lunar surface.