Spectacular jets powered by the gravitational energy of a super massive black hole in the core of the elliptical galaxy Hercules A are shown off by the combined imaging power of the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 and the recently upgraded Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico.

 Astronomers theorize that an as-yet-unidentified form of matter is responsible for 90 percent of the gravity within galaxies and clusters of galaxies but because it is detected via its gravity and not its light, they call it "dark matter." 

A monster black hole has been detected.  With 17 billion solar masses, it is significantly heavier than models predict and could be the most massive black hole known to date. 

 Astronomers believe there is a super-massive black hole at the heart of every galaxy and its mass ranges from several hundred thousand solar masses to a few billion. The black hole that has been best investigated  sits at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and has around four million solar masses.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 so it has seen a lot - but it recently saw something that has not happened since 1997.

Seasonal atmospheric circulation direction changes on Titan, technically only a moon but bigger than the planet Mercury, happen only once every 15 years and are never observable from Earth. Titan is the only known moon to have a significant atmosphere and is one of only four terrestrial atmospheres in our Solar System - the others being Venus, Mars and obviously Earth. Since Titan's rotation axis is tilted similar to Earth, it experiences seasons in a similar way, they just take a lot longer, because Saturn takes 29.5 Earth years to orbit the Sun.

Astronomers have discovered vast comet belts surrounding two nearby planetary systems – GJ 581 and 61 Vir – known to host only Earth-to-Neptune-mass worlds.   Previously, scientists found that the dusty belt surrounding nearby star Fomalhaut must be maintained by collisions between comets. 

A jet of X-rays from the supermassive black hole in quasar
GB 1428+4217, 12.4 billion light years from Earth, has been detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory - the most distant X-ray jet ever observed. 

Giant black holes at the centers of galaxies can pull in matter at a rapid rate producing the quasar phenomenon. The energy released as particles fall toward the black hole generates intense radiation and powerful beams of high-energy particles that blast away from the black hole at nearly the speed of light. These particle beams can interact with magnetic fields or ambient photons to produce jets of radiation. 

Quasars are the luminous centers of distant galaxies powered by huge black holes.  Although black holes are noted for pulling material in, most quasars also accelerate some of the material around them and eject it at high speed.

Many theoretical simulations suggest that the impact of these outflows on the galaxies around them may resolve several enigmas in modern cosmology, including how the mass of a galaxy is linked to its central black hole mass, and why there are so few large galaxies in the Universe. However, whether or not quasars were capable of producing outflows powerful enough to produce these phenomena has remained unclear until now.

NASA's Cassini mission has spotted a second feature shaped like the 1980s video game icon Pac-Man, this time on Saturn's moon Tethys.The pattern appears in thermal data obtained by Cassini's composite infrared spectrometer, with warmer areas making up the Pac-Man shape.

And now the news from Alpha Centauri…(Oh, I’ve waited for so long to utter those words! News. From Alpha Centauri. Wow!)

The dwarf planet Makemake is about two thirds of the size of Pluto and farther from the Sun - but closer than Eris, the most massive so-called dwarf planet in the Solar System after the confusing reconfiguration by the International Astronomical Union that said Pluto was not a planet but then was, only a special non-planet along with others.

Like Eris, but unlike Pluto, Makemake has no atmosphere, making it even less sensical as a planet.