The barred spiral galaxy NGC 6872 has been considered a candidate for the biggest stellar system for decades and now a team of astronomers has officially crowned it the largest - so far.

There's a mystery in them there clouds - but astronomers at Caltech are on the case.

Near the crowded galactic center, billowing clouds of gas and dust hide a supermassive black hole 3,000,000X as massive as our sun, Its gravity is strong enough to grip stars that are whipping around it at thousands of kilometers per second. One particular cloud named G0.253+0.016
has delighted astronomers. Because scientists love a mystery. 

G0.253+0.016 defies the rules of star formation. But apparently those are more guidelines than rules.

Vega is the second brightest star in northern night skies and astronomers using the Infrared Space Telescopes have discovered an asteroid belt much like that of our sun. 

Results showing an asteroid belt around Vega makes it more similar to its twin, the star called Fomalhaut. Both stars now are known to have inner, warm asteroid belts and outer, comet-filled belts, similar in architecture to the asteroid and Kuiper belts in our own solar system.

The debris disk around nearby star Fomalhaut and a mysterious planet may be clues to a titanic planetary disruption in the system. 

The debris belt is wider than previously believed, spanning a section of space from 14 to 20 billion miles from the star. And it seems the planet follows an unusual elliptical orbit that carries it on a potentially destructive path through the vast dust ring. The planet, Fomalhaut b, swings as close to its star as 4.6 billion miles, and the outermost point of its orbit is 27 billion miles away from the star, according to recalculations made from newer Hubble observations made last year. 

17 percent of all sun-like stars have planets one to two times the diameter of Earth orbiting close to their host stars, according to a team of astronomers who created their estimate based on an analysis of the first three years of data from NASA's Kepler mission. Thousands of potential exoplanets have been detected, which is good news for those searching for habitable worlds outside our solar system. 

I just read with interest and awe the nice article appeared today in the arxiv about the search for dark matter annihilation in the sun's core by the Baksan Underground Scintillator Telescope (BUST), a facility operating since December 1978 (!) in the Caucasian valley of Baksan.

Planetary systems with very distant binary stars are particularly susceptible to violent disruptions, more so than if they had stellar companions with tighter orbits around them, according to a new paper.

There are some kinds of turbulence we know exists but proving it is difficult - turbulence in the ionized gas that fills the universe is one such example.

But now a research team says they have directly measured it for the first time - in the laboratory.

Nearby planetary nebula NGC 5189 and its bright gaseous nebula resembles a holiday ornament with a glowing ribbon - so it is perfect for a new Hubble image during the Christmas season.

 Planetary nebulae represent the final brief stage in the life of a medium-sized star. While consuming the last of the fuel in its core, the dying star expels a large portion of its outer envelope and this material then becomes heated by the radiation from the stellar remnant and radiates, producing glowing clouds of gas that can show complex structures, as the ejection of mass from the star is uneven in both time and direction.

Globular clusters are spherical collections of stars bound to each other by their mutual gravity. They are old, relics of the early years of the Universe, with ages of typically 12-13 billion years, and we know of roughly 150 globular clusters in the Milky Way.

Yet, like many humans, these clusters are still young at heart. Some are aging faster than others and that discovery has led to a way to measure the rate of aging. 

Star clusters form in a short period of time, meaning that all the stars within them tend to have roughly the same age. Because bright, high-mass stars burn up their fuel quite quickly, and globular clusters are very old, there should only be low-mass stars still shining within them.