Mars Spacecraft Teams On Alert For Dust-Storm Season - Heading into a period of the Martian year prone to major dust storms, the team operating NASA's twin Mars rovers is taking advantage of eye-in-the-sky weather reports. April 17, 2009

Coronal Mass Ejections Viewed In Detail - Twin NASA spacecraft have provided scientists with their first view of the speed, trajectory, and three-dimensional shape of powerful explosions from the sun known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. April 15, 2009

Youthful Supernovae Explained? - A team of astronomers, led by Dr. Bo Wang from the Yunnan Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has developed a new model which explains the formation of the most youthful type Ia supernovae. April 14, 2009

Discovery Challenges Galaxy Formation Theories - A team led by an Indiana University astronomer has found a sample of massive galaxies with properties that suggest they may have formed relatively recently. April 13, 2009

NASA Selects Material For Orion Spacecraft Heat Shield - NASA has chosen the material for a heat shield that will protect a new generation of space explorers when they return from the moon. April 10, 2009

Dramatically Backlit Dust In Giant Galaxy - The NASA/ESA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured this image of NGC 7049, a mysterious looking galaxy on the border between spiral and elliptical galaxies. April 9, 2009

Two Galaxies For A Unique Event - To celebrate the 100 Hours of Astronomy, ESO is sharing two stunning images of unusual galaxies, both belonging to the Sculptor group of galaxies. April 7, 2009

Young Pulsar Shows Its Hand - A small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for a beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. April 6, 2009

Hidden Exoplanet Found In Archival Data - A powerful, newly refined image-processing technique may allow astronomers to discover extrasolar planets that are possibly lurking in over a decade's worth of Hubble Space Telescope archival data. April 3, 2009

Cracking The Crusts Of Neutron Stars - Research by Michigan State University scientists is helping shed light on neutron stars, city-sized globs of ultra-dense matter that occasionally collapse into black holes. April 1, 2009

Cassini Provides Virtual Flyover Of Saturn's Moon Titan - "Fly me to the moon"-to Saturn's moon Titan, that is. New Titan movies and images are providing a bird's-eye view of the moon's Earth-like landscapes. March 31, 2009

Does Prebiotic Material Exist In Outer Space? - Both a Spanish and a French astrophysicist have identified a band in the infrared range that serves to track the presence of organic material rich in oxygen and nitrogen in the interstellar dust grains. March 30, 2009

Erratic Black Hole Regulates Itself - New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have made a major advance in explaining how a special class of black holes may shut off the high-speed jets they produce. March 27, 2009

Giant Solar Twists Discovered - Scientists at Queen's University have made a finding that will help us to understand more about the turbulent solar weather and its effect on our planet. March 25, 2009

Curious Pair Of Galaxies - The ESO Very Large Telescope has taken the best image ever of a strange and chaotic duo of interwoven galaxies. The images also contain some surprises - interlopers both far and near. March 24, 2009

Finding Twin Earths Is Harder Than Thought - Does a twin Earth exist somewhere in our galaxy? Astronomers are getting closer and closer to finding an Earth-sized planet in an Earth-like orbit. March 23, 2009

Clues To A Secret Of Life Found In Meteorite Dust - NASA scientists analyzing the dust of meteorites have discovered new clues to a long-standing mystery about how life works on its most basic, molecular level. March 20, 2009

New Microorganisms Discovered In Earth's Stratosphere - Three new species of bacteria, which are not found on Earth and which are highly resistant to ultra-violet radiation, have been discovered in the upper stratosphere by Indian scientists. March 19, 2009

The Day The Sun Brought Darkness - On March 13, 1989 the entire province of Quebec, Canada suffered an electrical power blackout. Hundreds of blackouts occur in some part of North America every year. The Quebec Blackout was different, because this one was caused by a solar storm. March 17, 2009

New Evidence For Dark Matter Around Small Galaxies - NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered a strong new line of evidence that galaxies are embedded in halos of dark matter. March 16, 2009

3-D View Of Remote Galaxies - Astronomers have obtained exceptional 3D views of distant galaxies, seen when the Universe was half its current age, by combining the twin strengths of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s acute eye, and the capacity of ESO’s Very Large Telescope to probe the motions of gas in tiny objects. March 13, 2009

NASA's Mars Rover Spirit Faces Circuitous Route - Loose soil piled against the northern edge of a low plateau called "Home Plate" has blocked NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Spirit from taking the shortest route toward its southward destinations for the upcoming Martian summer and following winter. March 10, 2009

Unexpected Source Of Gamma Rays Discovered In Space - An international team of astrophysicists, involving several research groups in Spain, has discovered a source of very high energy gamma rays in the region of the distant galaxies 3C 66A and 3C 66B. March 9, 2009

Into The Eye Of The Helix Nebula - A deep new image of the magnificent Helix planetary nebula has been obtained using the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory. March 6, 2009

Newfound Moon May Be Source Of Outer Saturn Ring - NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn's G ring an embedded moonlet that appears as a faint, moving pinprick of light. Scientists believe it is a main source of the G ring and its single ring arc. March 5, 2009

Gamma Ray Burst Captured In Early Stages - UK astronomers, using a telescope aboard the NASA Swift Satellite, have captured information from the early stages of a gamma ray burst - the most violent and luminous explosions occurring in the Universe since the Big Bang. March 3, 2009

Watching Venus Glow In The Dark - ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has observed an eerie glow in the night-time atmosphere of Venus. March 2, 2009

Colors Of Quasars Reveal Dusty Universe - The vast expanses of intergalactic space appear to be filled with a haze of tiny, smoke-like "dust" particles that dim the light from distant objects and subtly change their colors, according to a team of astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-II). February 27, 2009

Astronomers Harness Einstein’s Telescope - Scientists are harnessing the cosmos as a scientific “instrument” in their quest to determine the makeup of the universe. February 26, 2009

Turbulence May Promote Birth Of Massive Stars - On long, dark winter nights, the constellation of Orion the Hunter dominates the sky. Within the Hunter’s sword, the Orion Nebula swaddles a cluster of newborn stars called the Trapezium. February 25, 2009

Sprightly Explanation For UFO Sightings? - In legend, sprites are trolls, elves and other spirits that dance high above our ozone layer. But scientists at Tel Aviv University have discovered that some very real "sprites" are zipping across the atmosphere as well, providing a possible explanation for those other legendary denizens of the skies, UFOs. February 24, 2009

Life Forms May Have Evolved In Ancient Hot Springs On Mars - Data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) suggest the discovery of ancient springs in the Vernal Crater, sites where life forms may have evolved on Mars, according to a new report. February 23, 2009

Huge Pressures Melt Diamonds On Planet Neptune - The enormous pressures needed to melt diamond to slush and then to a completely liquid state have been determined ten times more accurately by Sandia National Laboratories researchers than ever before. February 20, 2009

NASA And ESA Prioritize Outer Planet Missions - At a meeting in Washington last week, National Aeronautics and Space Administration and European Space Agency officials decided to continue pursuing studies of a mission to Jupiter and its four largest moons, and to plan for another potential mission to visit Saturn's largest moon Titan and Enceladus. February 19, 2009

Cosmologists Aim To Observe First Moments Of Universe - During the next decade, a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal convincing evidence for the popular cosmic inflation theory, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago. February 17, 2009

Ultra-Compact Dwarf Galaxies - In our Galaxy, we are used to the idea that even the nearest stars are light years away from the Sun. But a team of scientists led by Professor Pavel Kroupa of the University of Bonn think things were very different in the early Universe. February 16, 2009

Intricate Structures Of Brightest Nebulae In Sky - The latest ESO image reveals amazing detail in the intricate structures of one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the sky, the Carina Nebula (NGC 3372), where strong winds and powerful radiation from an armada of massive stars are creating havoc in the large cloud of dust and gas from which the stars were born. February 13, 2009

Cosmologists 'See' The Cosmic Dawn - The images, produced by scientists at Durham University's Institute for Computational Cosmology, show the "Cosmic Dawn" - the formation of the first big galaxies in the Universe. February 12, 2009

How Many Dimensions In The Holographic Universe? - Viennese scientists are trying to understand the mysteries of the holographic principle: How many dimensions are there in our universe? February 10, 2009

Stars Form At Record Speeds In Infant Galaxy - When galaxies are born, do their stars form everywhere at once, or only within a small core region? February 9, 2009

Astronomers Spot Cosmic Dust Fountain - DSpace dust annoys astronomers just as much as the household variety when it interferes with their observations of distant stars. And yet space dust also poses one of the great mysteries of astronomy. February 6, 2009

Mars Rover Device Gets New Mission On Earth - Developed to sniff out extraterrestrial life on other planets, a portable device known as the Mars Organic Analyzer (MOA) is taking on a new role in detecting air pollutants on Earth. February 5, 2009

NASA And Google Launch Virtual Exploration Of Mars - NASA and Google have announced the release of a new Mars mode in Google Earth that brings to everyone's desktop a high-resolution, three-dimensional view of the Red Planet. February 3, 2009

Mystery Of Twin Quasar Brightness Revealed - Variations in the brightness of the Q0957+561 quasar, also known as the “twin quasar” due to its duplicated image on Earth, are intrinsic to the entity itself and not caused by the gravitational effects of possible planets or stars from a far away galaxy. February 2, 2009

Black Hole Outflows From Centaurus A - Astronomers have a new insight into the active galaxy Centaurus A (NGC 5128), as the jets and lobes emanating from the central black hole have been imaged at submillimetre wavelengths for the first time. January 29, 2009

C1XS Catches First Glimpse Of X-ray From The Moon - The C1XS X-ray camera, jointly developed by the UK’s STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), has successfully detected its first X-ray signature from the Moon. January 26, 2009

'Super-Neptune' Exoplanet Discovered - Astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have discovered a planet somewhat larger and more massive than Neptune orbiting a star 120 light-years from Earth. January 23, 2009

Frantic Activity Revealed In Dusty Stellar Factories - Astronomers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (Spain) used NACO, a sharp-eyed adaptive optics instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), to study the fine detail in NGC 253, one of the brightest and dustiest spiral galaxies in the sky. January 21, 2009

Scientists Resolve Mystery Of How Massive Stars Form - Scientists may have solved one of the most longstanding astrophysical mysteries of all times: How massive stars - up to 120 times the mass of our sun - form without blowing away the clouds of gas and dust that feed their growth. January 19, 2009

'Stellar Cannibalism' Is Key To Formation Of Overweight Stars - Astronomical researchers have discovered evidence that blue stragglers in globular clusters, whose existence has long puzzled astronomers, are the result of 'stellar cannibalism' in binary stars. January 16, 2009

Exoplanet Atmospheres Detected From Earth - Two independent groups have simultaneously made the first-ever ground-based detection of extrasolar planets thermal emissions. January 15, 2009

Active Galaxies Are Different Near And Far - An ongoing X-ray survey undertaken by NASA's Swift spacecraft is revealing differences between nearby active galaxies and those located about halfway across the universe. January 14, 2009

Hazards Of Severe Space Weather Revealed - A NASA-funded study describes how extreme solar eruptions could have severe consequences for communications, power grids and other technology on Earth. January 13, 2009

Baby Jupiters Must Gain Weight Fast - The planet Jupiter gained weight in a hurry during its infancy. It had to, since the material from which it formed probably disappeared in just a few million years, according to a new study of planet formation around young stars. January 12, 2009

Hubble Views Galactic Core In Unprecedented New Detail - This composite color infrared image of the center of our Milky Way galaxy reveals a new population of massive stars and new details in complex structures in the hot ionized gas swirling around the central 300 light-years. January 8, 2009

Lunar Rock-Like Material May Someday House Moon Colonies - Dwellings in colonies on the moon one day may be built with new, highly durable bricks developed by students from the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. January 7, 2009

Astronomers To Gaze Back In Time And Map History Of Universe - UK astronomers are set to expand our knowledge of the history of our Universe with a new project to map the inception and formation of galaxies. January 6, 2009

Mars Rovers Near Five Years Of Science And Discovery - NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity may still have big achievements ahead as they approach the fifth anniversaries of their memorable landings on Mars. January 1, 2009

What Can Swiss Cheese Teach Us About Dark Energy? - About 10 years ago, scientists reached the astonishing conclusion that our universe is accelerating apart at ever-increasing speeds, stretching space and time itself like melted cheese. December 29, 2008

Sparkling Spray Of Stars Seen - NGC 2264 lies about 2600 light-years from Earth in the obscure constellation of Monoceros, the Unicorn, not far from the more familiar figure of Orion, the Hunter. December 26, 2008

Drama In The Heart Of The Tarantula Nebula - Found in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud, 30 Doradus is one of the largest massive star forming regions close to the Milky Way. December 23, 2008

New Model Explains Movements Of The Moon - Two researchers from the universities of Valladolid and Alicante are developing a mathematical formula to study the rotation of the moon, taking into account its structure, which comprises a solid external layer and a fluid internal core. December 22, 2008

What Came Before The Big Bang? - The Big Bang is widely considered to have obliterated any trace of what came before. December 19, 2008

Looking For Extraterrestrial Life In All The Right Places - Scientists are expanding the search for extraterrestrial life - and they've set their sights on some very unearthly planets. December 17, 2008

Jupiter's Moon Europa Does The Wave To Generate Heat - One of the moons in our solar system that scientists think has the potential to harbor life may have a far more dynamic ocean than previously thought. December 16, 2008

New Detector Will Aid Dark Matter Search - Several research projects are underway to try to detect particles that may make up the mysterious "dark matter" believed to dominate the universe's mass. December 15, 2008

Astronomers Find The Two Dimmest Stellar Bulbs - It's a tie! The new record-holder for dimmest known star-like object in the universe goes to twin "failed" stars, or brown dwarfs, each of which shines feebly with only one millionth the light of our sun. December 12, 2008

Hubble Telescope Finds Carbon Dioxide On An Extrasolar Planet - NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet orbiting another star. This breakthrough is an important step toward finding chemical biotracers of extraterrestrial life. December 10, 2008

NASA's Swift Looks To Comets For A Cool View - NASA's Swift Gamma-ray Explorer satellite rocketed into space in 2004 on a mission to study some of the highest-energy events in the universe. December 9, 2008

Ancient Climate Cycles Recorded In Mars Rocks - Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and their colleagues have found evidence of ancient climate change on Mars caused by regular variation in the planet's tilt, or obliquity. On Earth, similar astronomical forcing of climate drives ice-age cycles. December 8, 2008

How To Destroy An Asteroid - In the hit 1998 movie Armageddon, Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck blew up an asteroid to save the world. While the film was science fiction, the chances of an asteroid hitting the Earth one day are very real - and blowing up an asteroid in real life, says a Tel Aviv University researcher, will be more complicated than in the movies. December 5, 2008

NASA Prepares For New Juno Mission To Jupiter - NASA is officially moving forward on a mission to conduct an unprecedented, in-depth study of Jupiter. December 4, 2008

Glittering Giant Of Southern Skies - Omega Centauri is one of the finest jewels of the southern hemisphere night sky, as ESO's latest stunning image beautifully illustrates. Containing millions of stars, this globular cluster is located roughly 17 000 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus. December 3, 2008

Solar Wind Rips Up Martian Atmosphere - Researchers have found new evidence that the atmosphere of Mars is being stripped away by solar wind. It's not a gently continuous erosion, but rather a ripping process in which chunks of Martian air detach themselves from the planet and tumble into deep space. December 2, 2008

Hubble Captures Outstanding View Of Mammoth Stars - The Hubble telescope has captured a spectacular image of a pair of colossal stars, WR 25 and Tr16-244, located within the open cluster Trumpler 16. November 28, 2008

Missing Link Discovered - Astronomers in two UK-led international collaborations have separately uncovered a type of galaxy that represents a missing link in our understanding of galaxy evolution. November 27, 2008

Binary Star Explosion Inside Nebula Challenges Star Theory - The explosion of a binary star inside a planetary nebula has been captured by a team led by UCL (University College London) researchers – an event that has not been witnessed for more than 100 years. November 26, 2008

Mars Express Observes Aurora On The Red Planet - Scientists using ESA’s Mars Express have produced the first crude map of aurorae on Mars. These displays of ultraviolet light appear to be located close to the residual magnetic fields generated by Mars’s crustal rocks. November 25, 2008

Beta Pictoris Planet Finally Imaged? - A team of French astronomers using ESO's Very Large Telescope have discovered an object located very close to the star Beta Pictoris, and which apparently lies inside its disc. November 24, 2008

NASA Tests First Deep-Space Internet - NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. November 20, 2008

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