The most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang – found something a little odd. 

The information extracted from Planck’s new map provides an excellent confirmation of the standard model of cosmology at an unprecedented accuracy, setting a new benchmark in our manifest of the contents of the Universe - but because precision of Planck’s map is so high, it also made it possible to reveal some peculiar unexplained features that may well require new physics to be understood.

Electrically charged lunar dust near shadowed craters can get lifted above the surface and 'jump' over the shadowed region, bouncing back and forth between sunlit areas on opposite sides.

On Jupiter, cloudless patches are so rare that the larger visible ones get the special name 'hot spots.'

How do these clearings form and why they are they only found near the planet's equator?

It's a mystery, by Jove, but using images from the Cassini spacecraft, scientists have found new evidence that hot spots in Jupiter's atmosphere are created by a Rossby wave, a pattern also seen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans. The team found the wave responsible for the hot spots glides up and down through layers of the atmosphere like a carousel horse on a merry-go-round.

A team of international scientist has made the most detailed examination yet of the atmosphere of a Jupiter-size like planet beyond our solar system. 

Scientists have discovered another rare triple quasar system. 

Quasars are extremely bright and powerful sources of energy that sit in the center of a galaxy, surrounding a black hole. In systems with multiple quasars, the bodies are held together by gravity and are believed to be the product of galaxies colliding.

It is very difficult to observe triplet quasar systems, because of observational limits that prevent researchers from differentiating multiple nearby bodies from one another at astronomical distances. Moreover, such phenomena are presumed to be very rare.

The gravitational field surrounding the massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 68 acts as a natural lens in space to brighten and magnify the light coming from very distant background galaxies.

Like a fun house mirror, lensing creates a fantasy landscape of arc-like images and mirror images of background galaxies. The foreground cluster is 2 billion light-years away, and the lensed images come from galaxies far behind it.

In this photo, the image of a spiral galaxy at upper left has been stretched and mirrored into a shape similar to that of a simulated alien from the classic 1970s computer game "Space Invaders!" A second, less distorted image of the same galaxy appears to the left of the large, bright elliptical galaxy.

Earth's radiation belts, called Van Allen belts, were discovered after the very first launches of satellites in 1958 by James Van Allen. Subsequent missions have observed parts of the belts but what causes such dynamic variation in the belts has remained something of a mystery. Seemingly similar storms from the sun have at times caused completely different effects in the belts, or have sometimes led to no change at all.

Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova. A supernova discovered Feb. 6th exploded about 450 million years ago while the second, discovered Nov. 20th, 2012, exploded about 230 million years ago.

Astronomers using new data from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array - NuSTAR - and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton X-ray satellites have measured  the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365, more than 2 million miles across, and discover it is spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light.

A black hole's gravity is so strong that, as the black hole spins, it drags the surrounding space along. The edge of this spinning hole is called the event horizon. Any material crossing the event horizon is pulled into the black hole. Inspiraling matter collects into an accretion disk, where friction heats it and causes it to emit X-rays.