Plasma astrophysicists at the University of Warwick have found that key information about the Sun’s 'storm season’ is being broadcast across the solar system in a fractal snapshot imprinted in the solar wind. This research opens up new ways of looking at both space weather and the unstable behaviour that affects the operation of fusion powered power plants.

The University of Delaware is helping to build a huge "IceCube" at the South Pole, and it has nothing to do with cooling beverages.

"IceCube" is a gigantic scientific instrument--a telescope for detecting illusive particles called neutrinos that can travel millions of miles through space, passing right through planets.

The IceCube telescope's optical detectors are deployed in mile-and-a-half deep holes in the Antarctic ice. Credit: James Roth, University of Delaware

The High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express has captured breathtaking images of the Deuteronilus Mensae region on Mars.

The images were taken on 14 March 2005 during orbit number 1483 of the Mars Express spacecraft with a ground resolution of approximately 29 metres per pixel.

This image shows a perspective view of the Deuteronilus Mensae region on Mars. It was taken on 14 March 2005 by the High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard ESA’s Mars Express with a ground resolution of approximately 29 metres per pixel. It is believed that the valleys visible in the image may have originated from intense flooding by melted water ice.

A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.

Members of the rover science team heard from a colleague during a recent teleconference that the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, a chemical analyzer at the end of Spirit's arm, had measured a composition of about 90 percent pure silica for this soil.

Astronomers have used powerful adaptive optics technology at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i to reveal the precise locations and environments of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of an ongoing collision between two galaxies 300 million light-years away.

The new observations of the galaxy merger known as NGC 6240 reveal that each of the black holes resides at the center of a rotating disk of stars and is surrounded by a cloud of young star clusters formed in the merger.

An adaptive optics image of the double nucleus of the galaxy merger NGC 6240, taken in infrared light with the Keck II Telescope.

The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii has a new way to look at the Universe, thanks to two revolutionary instruments called HARP and ACSIS. These instruments operate together, and they recently sliced through the Orion Nebula, recording for the first time the internal movements of its star-forming gases.

This movie takes the observer through the data cube and gives a feel of how the gas is moving. The movie starts with clouds in the southern region, and then shows them progressively more towards the north as it steps through the wavelength slices. This reveals an expansion of gas. Gas to the south is moving towards the observer, while to the north it is moving away from the observer.

Astronomers have discovered the exact location and makeup of a pair of supermassive black holes at the center of a collision of two galaxies more than 300 million light years away.

Using adaptive optics (AO), which clear the blurring effects of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere, Livermore scientists observed that the two black holes formed at the center of a rotating disk of stars in the galaxy merger known as NGC 6240 and are surrounded by a cloud of young star clusters.

Over the course of the next few hundred million years,, the two supermassive black holes, which are about 3,000 light years apart, will drift toward one another and merge to form one large

Two astrophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., Nikolai Shaposhnikov and Lev Titarchuk, have successfully tested a new method for determining the masses of black holes.

This elegant technique, which Titarchuk first suggested in 1998, shows that the black hole in a binary system known as Cygnus X-1 contains 8.7 times the mass of our sun, with a margin of error of only 0.8 solar mass.

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Astronomers have long suspected the existence of the invisible substance of dark matter as the source of additional gravity that holds together galaxy clusters. Otherwise, astronomers say, the clusters would fly apart if they relied only on the gravity from their visible stars. Although astronomers don't know what dark matter is made of, they hypothesize that it is a type of elementary particle that pervades the Universe.

In a result just published, astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope report the discovery of a ring of dark matter in the cluster ZwCl0024+1652.

How old are the oldest stars" Using ESO's VLT, astronomers recently measured the age of a star located in our Galaxy. The star, a real fossil, is found to be 13.2 billion years old, not very far from the 13.7 billion years age of the Universe. The star, HE 1523-0901, was clearly born at the dawn of time.

"Surprisingly, it is very hard to pin down the age of a star", the lead author of the paper reporting the results, Anna Frebel, explains.