Details have been emerging of the plan by billionaire entrepreneurs to mine asteroids for their resources.

The multi-million-dollar plan would use robotic spacecraft to squeeze chemical components of fuel and minerals such as platinum and gold out of the rocks.

The founders include film director and explorer James Cameron as well as Google’s chief executive Larry Page and its executive chairman Eric Schmidt.

They even aim to create a fuel depot in space by 2020.

However, several scientists have responded with scepticism, calling the plan daring, difficult and highly expensive.

They struggle to see how it could be cost-effective, even with platinum and gold worth nearly £35 per gram ($1,600 an ounce). An upcoming Nasa mission to return just 60g (two ounces) of material from an asteroid to Earth will cost about $1bn.

The inaugural step, to be achieved in the next 18 to 24 months, would be launching the first in a series of private telescopes that would search for asteroid targets rich in resources. The intention will be to open deep-space exploration to private industry.

Within five to 10 years, however, the company expects to progress from selling observation platforms in orbit around Earth to prospecting services. It plans to tap some of the thousands of asteroids that pass relatively close to Earth and extract their raw materials.

The company, known as Planetary Resources, is also backed by space tourism pioneer Eric Anderson, X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis, former US presidential candidate Ross Perot and veteran Nasa astronaut Tom Jones.

The founders of the venture are to give further details in a press conference on Tuesday.

That’s a pretty big surprise to most people. They’re used to seeing magnificent detail in Hubble images, stars in galaxies and wisps of gas in beautiful nebulae. But those objects are far, far larger than the Moon. Hubble’s resolution is 0.1 arcseconds no matter how far away an object is. Those wisps of gas appear to be finely resolved, but they’re billions of kilometers across. That’s a bit roomier than the lunar landers were.

So even if we built a colossal sports arena in Tycho crater, Hubble would barely see it at all. The landers, rovers, and other junk left on the lunar surface by the astronauts are totally invisible.

Using a bigger telescope won’t help much. You’d need a mirror 50 times bigger than Hubble’s to see the landers at all, and we don’t have a 100 meter telescope handy.

However, there are two tricks we can use here. One is to look not for the artifacts themselves, but for their shadows. At sunrise or sunset, the shadow from a lander might be long enough to detect, even if the lander itself is invisible. However, this is a very tricky observation and has to be timed just right (and the landscape itself may hide the shadow; crater rims, mountains, and natural dips and bumps might prevent sunlight from hitting the lander until the Sun is high in the sky, and that will shorten the shadows).

Plus, try to convince a committee in charge of hotly-contested and hugely over-subscribed telescopes to give you a night to try this and see how they react. Good luck ever getting an observation again.

The other method is obvious enough: go back to the Moon and take a look. Later this year we will be sending the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to the Moon, and it will be able to resolve objects as small as 0.5 meters across (it’s far smaller than Hubble, but it’ll be a lot closer to the Moon). It will easily resolve the landers, and even the rovers.

A long-standing mystery about how dying stars spew out the material of future planets is now solved, scientists say.

While stars like our Sun are known to eject much of their mass in their final years, it has remained unclear just how the dust is blown away.

Scientists reporting in Nature describe an astronomical study of extraordinary resolution to tackle the mystery.

They found dust grains of nearly a millionth of a metre across, big enough to be pushed out by dying stars’ light.

The team of astronomers from Australian and European universities took a look at three so-called red giant stars - stars that were once like our Sun is now, but that have exhausted their supply of hydrogen and grown to gargantuan proportions.

In a process that is an extreme case of the kind of solar wind that our own Sun experiences, such stars blow much of their mass away in the form of gas and grains of mineral material on their way to becoming white dwarfs.

Lead author of the study Barnaby Norris, of the University of Sydney, told BBC News that the stars were “the galaxy’s great recyclers” - the material that they spit out “goes on to make the next generation of stars and planets”.

What Werner Becker of the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching has realized (and announced yesterday at the UK-Germany National Astronomy Meeting in Manchester), is that the universe comes equipped with its own set of exquisite clocks – pulsars – the timing of which can, in principle, be used to guide spacecraft in a similar way to how GPS is used here on Earth. Of course, it isn’t quite as simple as all that.

A significant obstacle to making this work today is that detecting signals from the pulsars requires X-ray detectors that are compact enough to be easily carried on spacecraft. However, it turns out the relevant technology is also needed by the next generation of X-ray telescopes, and should be ready in twenty years or so. Perhaps one day our spacecraft will map their routes through the cosmos thanks to yet another spinoff from basic research.

There could be many billions of planets not much bigger than Earth circling faint stars in our galaxy, says an international team of astronomers.

The estimate for the number of “super-Earths” is based on detections already made and then extrapolated to include the Milky Way’s population of so-called red dwarf stars.

The team works with the high-precision Harps instrument .

The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250,000 individual stars shining in it.

Messier 9, pictured here, is a globular cluster, a roughly spherical swarm of stars that lies around 25,000 light-years from Earth, near the center of the Milky Way, so close that the gravitational forces from the galactic center pull it slightly out of shape.

Globular clusters are thought to harbor some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, born when the universe was just a small fraction of its current age. As well as being far older than the sun — around twice its age — the stars of Messier 9 also have a markedly different composition, and are enriched with far fewer heavier elements than the sun.

In particular, the elements crucial to life on Earth, like oxygen and carbon, and the iron that makes up our planet’s core, are very scarce in Messier 9 and clusters like it. This is because the universe’s heavier elements were gradually formed in the cores of stars, and in supernova explosions. When the stars of Messier 9 formed, there were far smaller quantities of these elements in existence.

As well as showing the individual stars, Hubble’s image clearly shows the different colors of the stars. A star’s color is directly related to its temperature — counter-intuitively, perhaps, the redder it is, the cooler it is; and the bluer it is, the hotter. The wide range of stellar temperatures here is clearly displayed by the broad palette of colors visible in this image.

Your dream of visiting the Red Planet may soon come true if the claim made by Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, actually comes to fruition. The commercial space travel entrepreneur told the BBC in an interview that he’s figured out how to send a person on a round-trip journey to Mars and back, and that it could be ready in as little as ten years. The best part? Musk says that the “average person” could afford the trip since it will only cost $500,000. I’m not sure which average person he means, but you can bet I am going to be getting a second job for the next ten years to try to make it!

Known for its Dragon spacecraft that has been awarded the contract to make resupply trips to the International Space Station, SpaceX certainly seems capable of dreaming up a low-cost method of visiting Mars. The principle behind all of its vehicles is total re-usability; every single system must be able to be serviced and pressed back into operation. This is to cut down on the already astronomical cost of space flight (pun intended), making it more affordable for private companies to conduct missions into the heavens. The company’s main goal is to eliminate the equipment cost for space travel, leaving fuel as the only financial burden.

Scientists reckon that ‘warp speed’ planets could be flying through the galaxy at speeds of up to 30 million miles per hour.

Computer simulations have shown how the huge gravitational pull of black holes can tear planets from their orbits and ‘sling’ them across space.

The planets would typically move at about seven to 10 million mph - but could travel at up to 30 million mph.

That’s more than 450 times faster than the Earth moves around the Sun.

This theory comes from new research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US.

Astronomers know already that this can happen to stars - the first of these was spotted seven years ago, heading out of the Milky Way at 1.5 million mph.

A Nasa spacecraft has found further tantalising evidence for the existence of water ice at Mercury’s poles.

Though temperatures here can soar above 400C, some craters at Mercury’s poles are permanently in shadow, making them cold enough for water to stay frozen.

Previous work has revealed patches near Mercury’s poles that strongly reflect radar - a characteristic of ice.

Now, the Messenger probe has shown that these “radar bright” patches line up precisely with the shadowed craters .

Messenger is only the second spacecraft - after Mariner 10 in the 1970s - to have visited the innermost planet. Until Messenger arrived, large swathes of Mercury’s surface had never been mapped.

A team of scientists did exactly this , using SOHO, which is a solar observing and solar-orbiting satellite. Because it’s in space, it doesn’t suffer from the problems of peering through a murky, dancing atmosphere. They were able to measure the timing of Mercury’s passage of the Sun to an accuracy of 3 seconds in 2003 and 1 second in 2006. They had to take into account a large number of effects (the Sun’s limb is darker than the center, which affects timing; they had to accurately measure the position of Mercury; they had to account for problems internal to SOHO like focus and the way it changes across the detector; and, of course, correct for the fact that Mercury cut a chord across the Sun and didn’t go straight across the diameter — but that only took knowledge of Mercury’s orbit and some trig) but when they did, they got the most accurate measure of the Sun’s diameter ever made: 1,392,684 /- 65 km , or 865,374 /- 40 miles .

The planet Mercury was once an active and dynamic planet, according to new evidence from a Nasa spacecraft.

Data from the American Messenger probe shows that impact craters on the planet’s surface were distorted by some geological process after they formed.

The findings, reported in Science magazine, challenge long-held views about the closest world to the Sun.

Another study looking at Mercury’s gravity field shows that the planet has an unusual internal structure.

As well as being published in the journal Science, the research has also been presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

“Many scientists believed that Mercury was much like the Moon - that it cooled off very early in Solar System history, and has been a dead planet throughout most of its evolution,” said Maria Zuber, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

“Now, we’re finding compelling evidence for unusual dynamics within the planet, indicating that Mercury was apparently active for a long time.”

Dr Zuber and her colleagues used laser measurements from Messenger to map out a large number of impact craters, and found that many had tilted over time.

This suggests that geological processes within the planet have re-shaped Mercury’s terrain after the craters were created.

Observations of Caloris Basin, the planet’s largest impact feature, show that portions of the crater floor stand higher than its rim, suggesting that forces within Mercury’s interior pushed the surface up after the initial collision event.

The researchers also identified an area of lowlands near Mercury’s north pole that could have migrated there over the course of the planet’s evolution. A process called polar wander can cause geological features to shift around on a planet’s surface.

Our view of the Universe just grew quite a bit more detailed as NASA JPL released the compendium of results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer orbital telescope. WISE was launched into a 525 km orbit on December 14, 2009 and gathered data until the WISE team ran out of funding on February 17, 2011.

With hardware over 1,000 times more sensitive than prior infrared space surveys, WISE surveyed 99 percent of the sky at 4 different wavelengths. Over 15 terabytes of data and 2.7 million images revealed 560 million stars, galaxies, comets, asteroids, and various other objects too cool or red-shifted to show up in anything but the infrared. Astronomers saw Y-dwarfs for the first time, which are nearly-invisible brown dwarf stars too cool to see outside the infrared. The first Earth trojan asteroid also revealed itself to WISE—it scouts Earth’s orbit 60 degrees ahead of us around the Sun.

Our view of the solar system also grew quite a bit more detailed, as WISE identified or confirmed over 90 precent of the Near Earth Asteroids. One thing WISE was not able to do was see very much in the Kuiper belt; that task and many others remain for the James Webb Space Telescope now scheduled to be launched in 2018. The JWST will be several times more sensitive yet.

UC Berkeley has published many WISE images as they become available, and Cal Tech hosts JPL’s WISE website .

A strong solar storm is expected to hit Earth shortly, and experts warn it could disrupt power grids, satellite navigations systems and plane routes.

The storm - the largest in five years - will unleash a torrent of charged particles between 06:00 GMT and 10:00 GMT, US weather specialists say.

They say it was triggered by a pair of massive solar flares earlier this week.

It means there is a good chance of seeing the northern lights at higher latitudes, if the skies are clear.

The effects will be most intense in polar regions, and aircraft may be advised to change their routings to avoid these areas.

Venus is spinning more slowly and astronomers don’t know why.

In the 1990s, they worked out one Venetian day - the time for the planet to spin round once - lasted 243.018 Earth days.

But now, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter shows Venus’ spin is getting even slower and a day on Venus is now six and a half minutes longer.

Scientists aren’t sure why.

One cause could be Venus’ thick atmosphere and high winds pushing against the planet’s spin.

The news is important for future missions to the planet. Scientists use this data to plan missions to the planet and choose the best spot to land a rover.

The new speed means some features on Venus will be 20 kilometres away from they were expected to be.

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a new class of planet: a waterworld with a thick, steamy atmosphere.

The exoplanet GJ 1214b is a so-called “Super Earth” - bigger than our planet, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter.

Observations using the Hubble telescope now seem to confirm that a large fraction of its mass is water.

The planet’s high temperatures suggest exotic materials might exist there.

Astronomers have detected the first Earth-sized planets, which are orbiting a star similar to our own Sun.

In the distant past they may have been able to support life and one of them may have had conditions similar to our own planet - a so-called Earth-twin - according to the research team.

They have described their findings as the most important planets ever discovered outside our Solar System.

Details of the discovery are outlined in Nature journal.

On November 8, an asteroid 400 meters across will pass by the Earth, missing us by the very comfortable margin of about 320,000 kilometers (200,000 miles). Named 2005 YU55, it’s been known for some time that this pass will occur, and astronomers are jumping on the chance to observe it.

First off, it’s no danger to Earth right now. It’s what’s called a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid because its orbit intersects ours, but observations have shown it won’t be a danger to Earth for at least a century, and probably much more. There’s been some scare-mongering about it over the past few months, but as usual that’s all baloney. This rock will pass us safely, sailing on into the night.

But given that this is close in astronomical terms, astronomers will be observing it carefully. There are plans to use NASA’s Deep Space Network of radio telescopes, as well as the Arecibo ‘scope in Puerto Rico (which was used to make the image above back in April 2010). They’ll be able to see features on this rock as small as two meters across, which means we’ll actually get some interesting images of it, I hope. I’ll post those as soon as I see ‘em (which will be after November 8).

A mystery surrounding the first recorded supernova - seen by Chinese astronomers in 185AD - has been solved.

The supernova RCW 86 lit up the sky for eight months, documented at the time as a “guest star”.

In more recent times, astronomers have wondered how it grew so large, so fast.

Space telescope observations now suggest that before exploding, a wind of material from the star blew a cavity around it, into which the supernova could expand much more quickly.

The supernova, about 8,000 light-years away, is huge - if the infrared light it emits could be seen by our eyes, it would appear to be as large in the sky as the full Moon.

The findings, published in the Astrophysical Journal, combine existing data from the Chandra X-ray telescope and the XMM-Newton Observatory with recent images from the US space agency Nasa’s Spitzer and Wide-field Infrared Survey (Wise) telescopes.

What powers the Heart Nebula? The large emission nebula dubbed IC 1805 looks, in whole, like a human heart. The nebula glows brightly in red light emitted by its most prominent element: hydrogen. The red glow and the larger shape are all created by a small group of stars near the nebula's center. A close up in high dynamic range (HDR) spanning about 30 light years contains many of these stars is shown above. This open cluster of stars contains a few bright stars nearly 50 times the mass of our Sun, many dim stars only a fraction of the mass of our Sun, and an absent microquasar that was expelled millions of years ago. The Heart Nebula is located about 7,500 light years away toward the constellation of Cassiopeia.

Randy Halverson is an astrophotographer who takes gorgeous pictures of the sky and puts them together into amazing time lapse videos (see Related Posts below for links to his work). On Google+ this morning he posted a picture he took last night, and it’s simply stunning: the International Space Station rising into the Milky Way, with both reflected on a lake’s still waters:

It's the bubble versus the cloud. NGC 7635, the Bubble Nebula, is being pushed out by the stellar wind of massive central star BD+602522. Next door, though, lives a giant molecular cloud, visible to the right. At this place in space, an irresistible force meets an immovable object in an interesting way. The cloud is able to contain the expansion of the bubble gas, but gets blasted by the hot radiation from the bubble's central star. The radiation heats up dense regions of the molecular cloud causing it to glow. The Bubble Nebula, pictured above in scientifically mapped colors to bring up contrast, is about 10 light-years across and part of a much larger complex of stars and shells. The Bubble Nebula can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Queen of Aethiopia (Cassiopeia).

Scientists have discovered that Venus has an ozone layer.

The thin layer, which is hundred of times less dense than the Earth’s, was discovered by the European Space Agency’s Venus Express craft, researchers report in the journal Icarus.

Until now, ozone layers have only been detected in the atmospheres of Earth and Mars.

The find could help astronomers refine their hunt for life on other planets.

Astronomers have spotted gamma ray emissions coming from the Crab Pulsar at far higher energies than expected.

This challenges notions of how these powerful electromagnetic rays - like light, but far more energetic - are formed, researchers suggest in Science.

They found emissions at more than 100 gigaelectronvolts - 100 billion times more energetic than visible light.

The Crab Nebula that hosts the pulsar continues to amaze astronomers, despite being one of the most studied objects.

The remnant of a supernova that lit up the skies on Earth in 1054, it has been taken in modern times to be a constant source of light - so constant that telescopes were trained on it for calibrations.

But earlier this year, the Crab was spotted emitting gamma-ray flares that have confounded astronomers.

Within the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar - a tiny, rapidly spinning neutron star that sprays highly energetic electromagnetic rays out at its poles like a lighthouse beam, sweeping past the Earth 30 times a second.

The pulsar's enormous magnetic field is known to gather up particles and accelerate them - in a process much like particle accelerators here on Earth.

As those particles move in curved paths, they emit the gamma rays that we can measure.

In among a raft of papers published in this week’s edition of the journal Science, researchers reveal strange hollows that pock Mercury’s surface.

Irregular in shape, these depressions seem to form in the bright deposits that have been excavated where meteorites have impacted the surface.

The Messenger team cannot be sure what has caused them, but on Mars similar features are also known to exist.

In the case of the Red Planet, they are probably a consequence of evaporating carbon dioxide ice.

As the ice is driven off in the warmth of the Sun, it leaves a hole in the ground that produces a kind “Swiss cheese” terrain.

On Mercury, there is no carbon dioxide ice, so it would have to be some other kind of volatile material in play.

“It could be that there is some component in Mercury rocks that is unstable when it is exposed to the environment at the surface,” said David Blewett of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

A paper has been accepted for publication in a science journal (PDF) where the author has analyzed data from NASA’s Kepler planet-finding observatory, trying to figure out how many Earth-sized planets there might be in the galaxy orbiting their stars in their habitable zones; that is, at the right distance so that the star warms the planet enough to have liquid water. In the paper, he estimates that on average 34% (+/-14%) of Sun-like stars have terrestrial planets in that Goldilocks zone.

It’s hard to imagine just how enormous this cluster is. So to help, I cropped out the big spot on the left and put the Earth to scale next to it.

So yeah. That’s our whole planet.

Sunspots are big.

In fact, these guys are so big I tried to get a picture myself using binoculars, projecting the image onto a white board. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my set up to work well and all the pictures were out of focus. You might want to try it yourself, but be warned: the bright Sun can damage optics, so you might fry your binocs. Also, of course: NEVER LOOK AT THE SUN. Not with your eyes, not through a telescope, not through binoculars. There are ways to do that, but it takes specialized equipment, and it’s not worth the risk if you don’t know what you’re doing. The Stanford Solar Center has some advice about all this.

A planet orbiting two suns - the first confirmed alien world of its kind - has been found by Nasa's Kepler telescope, the US space agency announced.

It may resemble the planet Tatooine from the film Star Wars, but scientists say Luke Skywalker, or anyone at all, is unlikely to be living there.

Named Kepler-16b, it is thought to be an uninhabitable cold gas giant, like Saturn.

The newly detected body lies some 200 light years from Earth.

Though there have been hints in the past that planets circling double stars might exist - "circumbinary planets", as they are known - scientists say this is the first confirmation.

It means when the day ends on Kepler-16b, there is a double sunset, they say.

That’s the immediate issue. However, this rocket failure is a bit more problematic. The flaw appears to have happened in the manufacturing process, and that’s the sticky point. If it were something procedural setting up for launch (tanking up the rocket, for example), that’s a relatively easy fix. If it were some malfunction in the machinery used to make the rocket (again, possible to find and fix in general), the flaw would’ve turned up more often. That leaves something that happened by accident, and that’s not terribly reassuring. How do you know when a problem like that is mitigated? What was the exact circumstance that led to the pipe being faulty?

Until the Russians can figure that out, implement a fix, and make sure that problem is eliminated — and that other similar mistakes are prevented — it’s too risky to allow astronauts to fly on board the rocket. And that, currently, is the only way to get humans up to the space station. The only other rocket currently capable of getting up there is the Space X Falcon 9, which has not yet proven its reliability, and in any case has not been cleared by NASA to carry humans (the Space X Dragon capsule could theoretically do that, but needs to pass a set of strict regulations to be (pardon the expression) street legal).

I’ll note the Wall Street Journal is reporting that with the flaw being found, Soyuz flights could resume as early as October. Interestingly, the WSJ article reports that NASA is optimistic, while the NYT article says the Russian commission that investigated the crash is more cautious. The WSJ also says NASA may have a statement out this week, so we’ll see. I don’t see any mention of this on the NASA site (an ISS telecon will be held on Tuesday, September 20), but I’ll keep my eyes open.

Also note that three of the six astronauts on the ISS will be coming home in a Soyuz capsule on Thursday, September 15th (note the capsules are unrelated to the rocket that failed). They plan to undock and make the de-orbit burn at 03:06 UT Thursday (23:06 Eastern US time Wednesday night) and land in Kazakhstan 04:01 a.m. UT. That will leave three astronauts on the ISS; they will either have to come home to Earth by mid-November due to the limited fuel lifetime of their return capsule, or have a new capsule put in place. And that won’t be possible until flights resume.

Nasa is sending twin probes called Grail to map tiny variations in the pull of gravity around the lunar body.

The information should give scientists fresh insight into the internal structure of Earth's satellite.

This will help explain many mysteries, such as why the farside of the Moon looks so different from that of the nearside with its great swathe of dark volcanic plains, or maria.

The data also will be an invaluable navigation tool for future exploration, enabling other spacecraft to make more precise landings.

A Delta rocket sent the Grail twins on their way. Its launch from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station occurred at 09:08 EDT (13:08 GMT; 14:08 BST).

The journey to the Moon is a slow cruise, however. The duo is not expected to enter into orbit until the turn of the year.

At Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Space Launch Complex 17B in Florida, these spacecraft technicians may be the last persons to glimpse NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, spacecraft as the sections of the Delta payload fairing close around them. The fairing will protect the spacecraft from the impact of aerodynamic pressure and heating during ascent and will be jettisoned once they are outside the Earth's atmosphere. Launch aboard a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket from Pad 17B is scheduled for Sept. 8. The spacecraft will fly in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field. GRAIL's primary science objectives include determining the structure of the lunar interior, from crust to core, and understanding of the thermal evolution of the moon.

Scientists have discovered the coldest type of star-like bodies known, which at times can be cooler than the human body.

Astronomers had unsuccessfully pursued these dark entities, called Y dwarfs, ever since their existence was theorized more than a decade ago. They are nearly impossible to see relying on visible light, but with the infrared vision of NASA's WISE space telescope, researchers finally detected the faint glow of six Y dwarfs relatively close to our sun, within a distance of about 40 light-years.

Y dwarfs are the coldest members of star-like bodies known as brown dwarfs, which are odd objects sometimes known as failed stars.

Brown dwarfs are too puny to force atoms to fuse together and release nuclear energy, and so they have only the little heat they were born with. This heat fades over time until all the light they do emit is at infrared wavelengths. [Photos From NASA's WISE Telescope]

So far, WISE has helped find 100 new brown dwarfs.

But here you are, on top at last. You don’t have the sense of walking around 90-degree corners that our letter-writer naively imagines. Rather, the peak looks like the tip of a three-sided pyramid. The three sides fall away steeply — if you lose your footing you’ll have a wicked drop.

On the plus side, the view is like none on earth, or on any planet anywhere. You can sight down one edge of the cube to a far corner, a distance of some 6,400 miles. Even more strikingly, you see all the atmosphere and water has been concentrated by gravity into a blob in the middle of each face, with the corners and edges poking out into space. You realize your cubical planet isn’t one world but six, each face’s segment of the biosphere isolated from the others by the hopeless climb.

Bizarre? Yup. Impossible, too. You may want your planet to be cubical. Just about every other force in the universe wants it round.

How cool is this? Literally, the coolest: NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has found the lowest-temperature brown dwarfs ever seen, the tail end of the stellar class of brown dwarfs called Y dwarfs. How not hot are they? This one (called WISE 1828+2650 if you’re playing brown dwarf bingo), spotted by WISE, has a surface temperature of 25° Celsius — that’s 80° Fahrenheit!

Nasa says it will now cost $8.7bn to launch the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018 and operate it for five years.

The assessment - some $2bn higher than previous estimates - has emerged from documents sent to the US Congress.

James Webb is regarded as the successor to Hubble and will carry technologies capable of detecting the light from the first stars to shine in the Universe.

But delays and cost overruns have dogged the project, and now some politicians want JWST cancelled.

The House Appropriations Committee put forward a draft 2012 budget for the US space agency last month that would terminate funding for the observatory.

The equivalent Senate body has yet to have its say, however.

Nasa itself has fiercely defended the telescope, with senior officials describing JWST as one of their top priorities.

The observatory is supposed to be the next great undertaking in space astronomy, incorporating the biggest mirror ever sent into orbit. Its near-infrared detectors promise a swathe of remarkable discoveries about the early cosmos.

This image of the Earth and moon in a single frame, the first of its kind ever taken by a spacecraft, was recorded on Sept. 18, 1977, by Voyager 1 when it was 7.25 million miles from Earth. The spacecraft launched on July 20, 1975.

This photo was made from three images taken through color filters, then processed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Because the Earth is many times brighter than the moon, the moon was artificially brightened so that both bodies would show clearly in the prints.

I’ve been scratching my head for a long time, trying to figure out why NASA hasn’t been taking the idea of preventing asteroid impacts more seriously. This idea has everything you’d want in a project: it’s cool (I mean, c’mon, we’re talking asteroid impacts!), it’s doable, it’s not terribly expensive, it’s already on the public’s mind thanks to Hollywood, and there’s always the eensy-weensy possibility that you might save all of humanity.

Yet, despite this, it’s been an uphill battle to get NASA to pay attention. While the space agency has been very good about supporting early detection programs, the support for a space mission to prevent an impact has been lacking. Of course, given their relatively small budget (<1% of the federal spending) I imagine taking on anything like this would be difficult.

So I’m pretty chuffed that the European Space Agency is looking into saving our collective skins. They’ve being studying the feasibility of a mission to test methods of asteroid impact mitigation, including a very very cool space mission they’ve dubbed Don Quijote (first proposed in 2002, and may launch sometime after 2020). It’s actually two separate spacecraft: one to impact a small near-Earth asteroid, and another to monitor the event carefully to see what happens, including how much the orbit of the asteroid was changed.

When I was younger, I’d haul my ‘scope out to the driveway and peruse the heavens. Some of my favorite targets were open clusters: loose aggregations of stars that had dozens or even hundreds of members. These stars are all in the family, born by the same cloud of gas and still bound together by their own gravity.

A lot of these objects are big and bright, easily visible in binoculars — those tend to be close to us in space — and others fainter, harder to spot. Most of those latter ones are just farther away, but some are partially obscured by galactic dust, which robs them of light, like a curtain in a window partially blocking the light form outside.

I used to wonder how many open clusters the Milky Way sported. Thousands, I figured, and I also guessed a lot had been cataloged. But how many were behind such thick curtains of dust, hidden from our view? Some estimates are that there as many as 30,000 such groups. And now we’re starting to find them.

So it looks like impact rates from space are not periodic, at least not over the past 400 million years or so. We’re not "due" for one any time soon. And perhaps more importantly, given how some media tend to report these things (cough cough, there’s no solid evidence that we’re more at risk now than sometime in the past. I know a lot of people worry about these things, so I want to be clear on that.

And the good news is, as I pointed out recently, when their number came up dinosaurs didn’t have a choice to live or die. We have a space program, so the choice is ours.

One of astronomy's longest-running "missing persons" investigations has concluded: astronomers have found molecular oxygen in space.

While single atoms of oxygen have been found alone or incorporated into other molecules, the oxygen molecule - the one we breathe - had never been seen.

The Herschel space telescope spotted the molecules in a star-forming region in the constellation of Orion.

Astronomers have detected an asteroid not far from Earth, moving in the same orbit around the Sun.

The 200-300m-wide rock sits in front of our planet at a gravitational "sweet spot", and poses no danger.

Its position in the sky makes it a so-called Trojan asteroid - a type previously detected only at Jupiter, Neptune and Mars.

2010 TK7, as it is known, was found by Nasa's Wise telescope. The discovery is reported in this week's Nature journal.

It is a fascinating observation because the relative stability and proximity of Trojans would make possible targets for astronaut missions when we eventually go beyond the space station.

2010 TK7 is probably not the rock of choice, simply because it travels too far above and below the plane of Earth's orbit, which would require a lot of fuel to reach it.

Nonetheless, its detection means it is highly likely there are other, more suitable Trojans out there waiting to be found.

The difficulty is the viewing geometry that puts any Trojan, from the perspective of an Earth-based telescope, in bright skies.

Magnificent island universe NGC 2403 stands within the boundaries of the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis. Some 10 million light-years distant and about 50,000 light-years across, the spiral galaxy also seems to have more than its fair share of giant star forming HII regions, marked by the telltale reddish glow of atomic hydrogen gas. In fact, NGC 2403 closely resembles another galaxy with an abundance of star forming regions that lies within our own local galaxy group, M33 the Triangulum Galaxy. Of course, supernova explosions follow close on the heels of the formation of massive, short-lived stars and in 2004 one of the brightest supernovae discovered in recent times was found in NGC 2403. Easy to confuse with a foreground star in our own Milky Way Galaxy, the powerful supernova is seen here as the spiky, bright "star" at the left edge of the field. This stunning cosmic portrait is a composite of space and ground-based image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive and the 8.2 meter Subaru Telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Nasa's next Mars rover will be aimed at one of the planet's deepest craters.

MSL-Curiosity weighs almost a tonne and is the size of a Mini Cooper.

It will carry instruments to study whether Mars had the conditions in the past to support microbial life.

The US space agency has selected an equatorial depression called Gale Crater to investigate that question.

The $2.5bn rover will launch from Florida in November.

It should touch-down at the Red planet in August 2012.

Nix and Hydra were first introduced to human eyes in Hubble Space Telescope images from May 2005, as Pluto's second and third known moons. Now Hubble images have revealed a fourth satellite for the icy, dwarf planet. Provisionally designated P4, it completes an orbit of Pluto in about 31 days. Presently Pluto's smallest and dimmest known moon, P4 is estimated to be 13 to 34 kilometers across. The newly discovered satellite was first spotted in Hubble observations from June 28, and later confirmed in a follow-up on July 3 and July 18. These two panels are composites of both the short and long exposures that include brighter Pluto itself along with Pluto's largest moon Charon. Camera noise and image artifacts also show up in the long exposure segments. The Hubble observations were made while searching for faint rings around the distant world in support of NASA's New Horizons mission, set to fly by the Pluto system in 2015.

The giant asteroid Vesta is revealing more of itself to the US space agency's (Nasa) Dawn mission.

The probe has beamed back further images since entering into orbit around the 530km-wide rock on 17 July.

Dawn took the latest batch as it was travelling from the day side to the night side of Vesta.

The different lighting conditions provide scientists with additional information about the varied features on the rock's pockmarked surface.

As Dawn circles its target, so the asteroid itself turn on its axis. The rock rotates once every five hours and 20 minutes.

Dawn will spend a year studying Vesta before moving on to the biggest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - the dwarf planet Ceres.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have identified another moon around the dwarf planet Pluto.

It becomes the fourth object known to be circling the distant world after the long-recognised Charon and recently observed Nix and Hydra satellites.

Scientists are temporarily calling the new moon P4 and estimate its diameter to be 13 to 34 km (of 8 to 21 miles).

Pluto, controversially demoted from full planet status in 2006, will be the target of a big space mission in 2015.

Nasa's New Horizons probe is due to fly past the icy world and should get a good look at the moons, also.

NASA announced Wednesday that the Hubble Space Telescope has found a fourth moon circling Pluto, which had been demoted from full planet to dwarf planet. Astronomers had been looking to see if Pluto had a ring, but instead they found another object circling the dwarf planet that is 3 billion miles from Earth.

But it is a mini-moon. It is only eight to 21 miles wide. Pluto's biggest moon, Charon (SHARE-on), is 80 times bigger. The other two moons are Nix and Hydra.

Until astronomers decide a name, this moon is called P4.

Nasa's Dawn spacecraft has returned some remarkable new imagery of the asteroid Vesta, now that it is safely in orbit around the 530km-wide rock.

The pictures reveal the ancient body's craters, slopes and grooves in detail that is far beyond the vision of Earth-bound telescopes, including Hubble.

Dawn scientists will have a busy year interpreting the asteroid's features.

They will be looking for some fresh insight on how such objects came into being 4.6 billion years ago.

NGC 3314 is actually two large spiral galaxies which just happen to almost exactly line up. The foreground spiral is viewed nearly face-on, its pinwheel shape defined by young bright star clusters. But against the glow of the background galaxy, dark swirling lanes of interstellar dust appear to dominate the face-on spiral's structure. The dust lanes are surprisingly pervasive, and this remarkable pair of overlapping galaxies is one of a small number of systems in which absorption of light from beyond a galaxy's own stars can be used to directly explore its distribution of dust. NGC 3314 is about 140 million light-years (background galaxy) and 117 million light-years (foreground galaxy) away in the multi-headed constellation Hydra. The background galaxy would span nearly 70,000 light-years at its estimated distance. A synthetic third channel was created to construct this dramatic new composite of the overlapping galaxies from two color image data in the Hubble Legacy Archive.

A new study has given us an idea of that now, though. Here’s how this works: we see that as matter falls into them, some black holes generate twin beams, called jets, which shoot away from their poles. We see this from black holes that form when stars explode, and we see them in the supermassive black holes that inhabit the centers of all big galaxies, too. We know that various physical features of the jets are tied to the rate at which the black holes spin, and this new study makes this connection more clear. The astronomers used computer models to correlate spin to the jets, and observations appear to confirm these models.

Two very interesting results came out of the study. One is that in the past black holes tended to spin more slowly than they do today (that was found by looking at very distant galaxies with black holes in their centers; looking far away in distance is like seeing back in time; in this case several billion years). Something has changed between then and now. And that’s tied to the second interesting bit: black holes that grew by merging with other black holes — by eating each other! — appear to spin faster than ones that simply had matter fall into them. That’s not overwhelmingly surprising to me; the amount of angular momentum you can get by having two black holes merge is fierce. An event like that would spin up a black hole hellaciously.

Black hole mergers can occur when two galaxies collide. Each galaxy has their own supermassive black hole in their hearts, and these can merge over a timescale of a few billion years. That would explain why we see more faster spinning holes now. There’s been time for them to eat each other.

Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, the star factory known as Messier 17 lies some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius. At that distance, this degree wide field of view spans almost 100 light-years, courtesy of the European Southern Observatory's new VLT Survey Telescope and OmegaCAM. The sharp, false color image includes both optical and infrared data, following faint details of the region's gas and dust clouds against a backdrop of central Milky Way stars. Stellar winds and energetic light from hot, massive stars formed from M17's stock of cosmic gas and dust have slowly carved away at the remaining interstellar material producing the cavernous appearance and undulating shapes. M17 is also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula.

The total phase of the June 15 lunar eclipse lasted an impressive 100 minutes. Its entire duration is covered in this composite of a regular sequence of digital camera exposures, tracking the dark lunar disk as it arced above the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. In fact, around 270 BCE Greek astronomer Aristarchus also tracked the duration of lunar eclipses, though without the benefit of digital clocks and cameras. Still, using geometry, he devised a simple and impressively accurate way to calculate the Moon's distance, in terms of the radius of planet Earth, from the eclipse duration. A more modern Greek astronomer, Elias Politis titled this eclipse duration study and the accompanying youtube timelapse video "Acropoclipse".

Also, it seems very unlikely to me that we might experience another global cooling period due to this weakened sunspot cycle, but it shows you that there are very sensitive effects going on here that are very difficult to predict — and let me take this chance here to say that no, the Sun is not responsible for global warming, as has been shown fairly conclusively. It can mildly amplify or suppress such things, but is not the main driver of it. If it were, we’d see very strong correlations between the climate and solar activity on a decade-by-decade basis (or even shorter as sunspots form and dissipate over the course of days and weeks). We don’t, and therefore the Sun is not the culprit.

The point is the Sun is a complex beast, and it’s only just now that we are able to make any predictions about it at all. Even this one is not a sure thing, though I’ll admit the fact that three different lines of evidence point toward a weaker cycle are very interesting to say the least! I do hope they’re correct, actually. Not because I want to see one particular outcome or another from the next cycle, but because if these predictions do pan out it means we are beginning to understand the fiendishly complicated physics of our nearest star. Any time we can do that it means we can be prepared if it does decide to do something nasty.

The Dawn spacecraft is starting to get an eye-full of the Vesta asteroid.

The probe expects to reach the 530km-wide body in late July, whereupon it will go into orbit around the rock.

Vesta is what scientists term a protoplanet - a body that never acquired the proportions of "grown-up" planets such as Earth and Mars.

It is nonetheless an impressive object - the second most massive asteroid in the belt of rocky debris that orbits between Mars and Jupiter.

Nasa's (US space agency) Dawn satellite will be spending about 12 months at Vesta before moving on to Ceres which, at 950km in diameter, is by far the largest and most massive body in the asteroid belt.

The Sun let loose with an enormous explosion on the morning of June 7, 2011. The entire eruption was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The animation here is from the ultraviolet camera, colored orange to make it viewable.

Flora that would appear black or grey to human eyes could have evolved on planets orbiting dim "red dwarf" stars, according to unpublished research that is being presented at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales.

This would enable plants to absorb more light to photosynthesise, using their star's light to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds.

Jack O'Malley-James, a PhD student and astrobiologist at St Andrews University, focused on multiple star systems thought to be common throughout the universe.

He used models for star systems with two or three stars with various combinations of Sun-like and red dwarf stars. He then added planets to these models, orbiting around one or more of the stars.

This dusty island universe is one of the brightest spiral galaxies in planet Earth's sky. Seen nearly edge-on, NGC 253 is only 13 million light-years away, the largest member of the Sculptor Group of galaxies, neighbor to our own local galaxy group. The detailed close-up view is a five frame mosaic based on data assembled from the Hubble Legacy Archive. Beginning on the left near the galaxy's core, the sharp panorama follows dusty filaments, interstellar gas clouds, and even individual stars toward the galaxy's edge at the right. The magnificent vista spans nearly 50,000 light-years. The frame at the far right has been compressed slightly to bring into view an intriguing pair of background galaxies. Designated a starburst galaxy because of its frantic star forming activity, NGC 253 features tendrils of dust rising from a galactic disk laced with young star clusters and star forming regions. NGC 253 is also known to be a strong source of high-energy x-rays and gamma rays, likely due to massive black holes near the galaxy's center.

Io is the most volcanic world in the Solar System and scientists think they now have a better idea of why that is.

The moon of Jupiter erupts about 100 times more lava on to its surface each year than does Earth.

A re-assessment of data from Nasa's Galileo probe suggests all this activity is being fed from a giant magma ocean under Io's crust.

Researchers tell Science magazine that this blisteringly hot reservoir is probably some 50km (30 miles) thick.

This stunning 360 degree panorama of the night sky was stitched together from 37,000 images by a first-time astrophotographer.

Nick Risinger, a 28-year-old native of Seattle, trekked more than 60,000 miles around the western United States and South Africa to create the largest-ever true-color image of the stellar sphere. The final result is an interactive, zoomable sky map showing the full Milky Way and the stars, planets, galaxies and nebulae around it.

“The genesis of this was to educate and enlighten people about the natural beauty that is hidden, but surrounds us,” Risinger said.

The project began in March 2010, when Risinger and his brother took a suite of six professional-grade astronomical cameras to the desert in Nevada. By June, Risinger had quit his job as a marketing director for a countertop company to seek the darkest skies he could find.

Every night, Risinger and his father set up the cameras on a tripod that rotates with Earth. The cameras automatically took between 20 and 70 exposures each night in three different-color wavelengths. Previous professional sky surveys (including the Digitized Sky Survey of the 1980s, which is the source for the World Wide Telescope and Google Sky) shot only in red and blue. Including a third color filter gives the new survey a more real feeling, Risinger said.

“I wanted to create something that was a true representation of how we could see it, if it were 3,000 times brighter,” he said.

This month, four of the five naked-eye planets gather along the eastern horizon near dawn. The celestial grouping is seen here just before sunrise on May 5, from a beach near Buenos Aires, Argentina. Starting near the top of the frame, the brightest beacon is Venus. Mercury is below and right of Venus and brilliant Jupiter is lower still, near image center. Below Jupiter, Mars is relatively faint and struggles the most to shine through a thin cloud bank and the warming twilight glow. Watch, and as the month progresses the tantalizing configuration will change, with Mars and Jupiter moving higher while Venus and Mercury wander through the sky closer to the rising sun.

Last month, scientists using the GOCE spacecraft released a model of the Earth’s geoid: essentially, a shape telling you which way is down. If the Earth were a perfectly smooth sphere of constant density throughout, gravity would pull you straight down to the center (perpendicular to the surface). But if a dense hill were nearby, the gravity of that hill would change the direction of the force of gravity. The geoid maps that, and is very useful to understand things like ocean currents and such.

The resulting geoid resembles a bizarre, lumpy Earth. It was pretty neat, but now Nathanial Burton-Bradford has made it better: he took the data and made 3D anaglyphs!

If you believe the mainstream media, you might think this weekend’s "supermoon" will cause earthquakes, volcanoes, bad weather, halitosis, dust bunnies, and hangnails.

Guess what I think of this idea! Hint: check the name of my blog. Got it? Good.

In reality, this "supermoon" nonsense is, well, nonsense.

Sorry to bump Julianne’s fun post further down the page, but lots of news today. This particular piece of news is not fun: NASA is abandoning LISA, the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna, as well as IXO, an X-ray satellite observatory (formerly “Constellation X”). Steinn has some of the ugly details. Short story: money is tight, and the James Webb Space Telescope is taking all of it. (Not that JWST is completely immune from danger itself…)

LISA is not completely dead: the European Space Agency will keep the planning alive. But this is a serious step, not just a feint in a budget negotiation; the LISA International Science Team is being disbanded, told to pack up and go home. Hopefully the ESA will continue to push forward, and individual researchers in the US can somehow find money to still think about gravitational-wave astrophysics from space. It’s possible that a smaller mission could be put forward, but it’s not as if NASA has extra money they’re looking to spend right now.

If not perfect, then this spiral galaxy is at least one of the most photogenic. An island universe of about 100 billion stars, 32 million light-years away toward the constellation Pisces, M74 presents a gorgeous face-on view. Classified as an Sc galaxy, the grand design of M74's graceful spiral arms are traced by bright blue star clusters and dark cosmic dust lanes. The above image covers half the width of the full Moon and was obtained using 19 hours of exposure on the 1.23-meter telescope at Calar Alto Observatory in the Sierra de Los Filabres mountain range in Spain. Spanning about 30,000 light-years across the face of M74, it includes exposures recording emission from hydrogen atoms, highlighting the reddish glow of the galaxy's large star-forming regions.

Pretty cool! These infrared images from the Very Large Telescope all have the starlight removed to show the faint planet (the faint rings and other blobs are optical effects and can be ignored). The upper left picture is from 2003; the upper right from 2009 with the planet’s position in 2003 labeled; and the bottom is the new image from 2010 with both previous positions marked. The orbit of Saturn (tilted to the same inclination as Beta Pic b) is shown for comparison. You can see the planet moved a wee bit between 2009 and 2010, just as predicted.

Besides helping nail down the planet’s orbit, the new observations allow astronomers to find that the mass of the planet is between 7 and 11 times that of Jupiter, and the temperature probably between 1100 and 1700°C (2000 to 3100° F). The star is more massive and hotter than the Sun, which is one reason why the planet can be so hot even that far out.

The other is that system is actually very young as well, being only about 12 million years old — compare that to our solar system, which is 4.6 billion years old! So the planet is still glowing with the leftover heat of its formation. In fact, the temperature measurements are critical, because scientists who study the way planets form predict how hot planets will be at different times in their life… and this planet is hotter than some computer models predict. Observations like this help theoretical astronomers figure out which models are correct, and which still need work.

But even aside from all that, this image is still pretty amazing. That planet is 630 trillion km (390 trillion miles) from Earth — that’s 630,000,000,000,000 kilometers! And there it is.

Think about that. In 1992 we didn’t even know if planets outside our solar system existed. Then we discovered some weird ones, and just three years later the first planet orbiting a sun-like star was found. And now, just 16 years later, we’ve directly seen more than a half dozen of them!

Incredible.

And now, by measuring first the Cepheids and then using them to determine the distance to far-flung supernovae, they have nailed down just how fast the Universe is expanding: 73.8 (plus or minus 2.4) km/sec/megaparsec.

OK, so what does that mean?

We see galaxies rushing away from us. Moreover, the farther away they are, the faster they appear to be moving. The rate of that expansion is what was measured. If you find a galaxy 1 megaparsec away (about 3.26 million light years), the expansion of space would carry it along at 73.8 km/sec (fast enough to cross the United States in about one minute!). A galaxy 2 megaparsecs away would be traveling away at 147.6 km/sec, and so on*.

The last time this was measured accurately, the speed was seen to be 74.2 +/- 3.6 km/sec/mpc. Note the uncertainty; both the old and new measurements overlap to within their uncertainty (which is good!), but the new one has a smaller uncertainty. In other words it’s most likely more accurate.

By knowing this number so well, it allows better understanding of how the Universe is behaving. It also means astronomers can study just how much the Universe deviates from this constant rate at large distances due to the acceleration. And that in turn allows us to throw out some ideas for what dark energy is, and entertain notions of what it might be. For example, one idea was that instead of dark energy accelerating the Universe, it was an illusion due to our region in the local Universe being unusually underdense — that would make it look like distant galaxies are receding faster than expected. However, the precision of the new measurement rules this out; the value needed by the void model would have to be much lower. So right away we know that this explanation doesn’t work, and the idea of dark energy survives another battle.

So that number of 73.8 +/- 2.4 km/sec/mpc may sound arcane and weird to you, but it is in fact the key to understanding the Universe itself. It’s amazing that so much can ride on one number… but that’s the Universe for you.

How could part of the early universe be so cold? No one is sure, and many astronomers now think that the CMB Cold Spot on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation is not particularly noteworthy. As the early universe expanded and cooled, it suddenly and predictably became transparent. The photons that come to us from that epoch are seen all around us as the CMB. Now this radiation field is quite uniform but does have slight warm and cool spots that tell us a great deal about the early universe that could have imprinted them. Except, possibly, one spot. This CMB Cold Spot, circled above on the WMAP 7-year all-sky map, has attracted attention as possibly being too large and too cold to be easily explained. Published speculation has included spectacular progenitor hypotheses that involve a supervoid, a cosmic texture, or even quantum entanglement with a parallel universe. Quite possibly, though, even a more mundane universe might be expected to show such a statistical peculiarity, and so explanations of the CMB Cold Spot like these might say more about human imagination than the early universe.

The full moon is seen as it rises near the Lincoln Memorial, Saturday, March 19, 2011, in Washington. The full moon tonight is called a super perigee moon since it is at its closest to Earth in 2011. The last full moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March 1993.

Close to the Great Bear (Ursa Major) and surrounded by the stars of the Hunting Dogs (Canes Venatici), this celestial wonder was discovered in 1781 by the metric French astronomer Pierre Mechain. Later, it was added to the catalog of his friend and colleague Charles Messier as M106. Modern deep telescopic views reveal it to be an island universe -- a spiral galaxy around 30 thousand light-years across located only about 21 million light-years beyond the stars of the Milky Way. Along with a bright central core, this colorful composite image highlights youthful blue star clusters and reddish stellar nurseries tracing the galaxy's spiral arms. It also shows off remarkable reddish jets of glowing hydrogen gas. In addition to small companion galaxy NGC 4248 (bottom right) background galaxies can be found scattered throughout the frame. M106 (aka NGC 4258) is a nearby example of the Seyfert class of active galaxies, seen across the spectrum from radio to x-rays. Active galaxies are believed to be powered by matter falling into a massive central black hole.

The extraordinary Voyager 1 spacecraft is demonstrating its nimbleness more than 30 years after leaving Earth.

At the astonishing distance of 17.4 billion km, the Nasa probe is the most far-flung object made by humans.

But it seems age and remoteness are no barriers to this veteran explorer.

Voyager is executing a series of roll manoeuvres to get one of its instruments into the optimum position to measure particles sweeping away from the Sun.

I should copyright the phrase, "Thierry Legault has done it again!" because he does keep seeming to do it again! He is an "amateur" astronomer in Europe, and takes phenomenal pictures of spacecraft from the ground. And this one is pretty incredible: it shows NASA astronaut Steve Bowen doing a spacewalk during Discovery’s last flight to the space station!

Need your slice of awesome today? Then check out this truly astonishing picture of a detached prominence off the limb of the Sun:

"Astronomers have confirmed that an exploding star spotted by Nasa's Swift satellite is the most distant cosmic object to be detected by telescopes. In the journal Nature, two teams of astronomers report their observations of a gamma-ray burst from a star that died 13.1 billion light-years away. The massive star died about 630 million years after the Big Bang."

"This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only tremendously complex, but appear to have less mass than expelled in the original supernova and a higher speed than expected from a free explosion. The above image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is presented in three colors chosen for scientific interest. The Crab Nebula spans about 10 light-years. In the nebula's very center lies a pulsar: a neutron star as massive as the Sun but with only the size of a small town. The Crab Pulsar rotates about 30 times each second. " Very pretty.

"Could astronomers accidentally blind Earth-observing satellites? That seems to be the worry of the US air force, which restricts the use of lasers pointed at the sky to help focus telescopes. But some astronomers warn they will miss key observations under the rules, which have tightened in recent years. About half to two-thirds of the objects astronomers seek to observe have off-limits periods, or closures, in a given night, the report adds. These periods last a few seconds to a few minutes each. But it is not clear how sensitive the satellites' optics are, or how likely a given laser is to directly hit a satellite's optics, since details on some US Department of Defense satellites are not publicly released. The air force simply takes astronomers' proposed laser-assisted observations and tells them when to turn the lasers off after crunching its own data on satellite orbits."

"This mid-infrared image was taken in the last minutes of the LCROSS flight mission to the Moon. The small white spot (enlarged in the insets) seen within the dark shadow of lunar crater walls is the initial flash created by the impact of a spent Centaur upper stage rocket. Traveling at 1.5 miles per second, the Centaur rocket hit the lunar surface yesterday at 11:31 UT, followed a few minutes later by the shepherding LCROSS spacecraft. Earthbound observatories have reported capturing both impacts. But before crashing into the lunar surface itself, the LCROSS spacecraft's instrumentation successfully recorded close-up the details of the rocket stage impact, the resulting crater, and debris cloud. In the coming weeks, data from the challenging mission will be used to search for signs of water in the lunar material blasted from the surface. "

"The nearly 600km-wide rock is an example of an object that started out on the process of becoming a planet but never grew up into the real thing."

"The large asteroid Apophis poses less of a threat of walloping the Earth in the year 2036 than previously thought, new research finds. The asteroid would not cause a global catastrophe, but could likely spawn significant regional devastation if it were ever to strike the planet, scientists have said. The new data shows that the asteroid will make another close approach with Earth in 2068 with the chance of impact currently at approximately three-in-a-million. As with the other potential impacts, now ruled as mere close encounters, the probability of the 2069 impact is expected to go down as more information on the asteroid is gathered."