New Discoveries at Mercury

Mercury's magnetic field is "alive." Volcanic vents ring the planet's giant Caloris Basin. And Mercury has shrunk in on itself more than previously suspected.
These are just a few of the new discoveries by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft, which flew past Mercury on January 14, 2008. The results are described in a series of 11 papers published in a special July 4th issue of Science magazine.
Six of the papers in Science report studies of the planet's surface--its colors, mineralogy, and the shape of its terrain. For instance, the color enhanced image below reveals evidence of volcanic vents along the margins of Caloris basin, one of the Solar System's largest and youngest impact basins:
"By combining Mariner 10 and MESSENGER data, the science team was able to reconstruct a comprehensive geologic history of the entire Caloris basin interior," says James Head of Brown University, lead author of one of the Science reports. "The basin was formed from an impact by an asteroid or comet during a period of heavy bombardment in the first billion years of Solar System history. As with the lunar maria, a period of volcanic activity followed, producing lava flows that filled the basin interior. This volcanism is responsible for the comparatively light, red material of the interior plains intermingled with [newer] impact crater deposits."
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The Heat is On: Spitzer's Infrared Views of the Cosmos

RCW 38 is at a distance of ~1.7 kpc (~5500 light years) from us, near the famous Vela supernova remnant and the Gum nebula. This starforming region contains a number of highly massive O stars embedded in a dense obscuring cloud. The stars are about 2 million years old, indicating that star formation is ongoing is this relatively young region.

Telescope snaps most distant object

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers tracking a mysterious blast of energy called a gamma ray burst said on Tuesday they had snapped a photograph of the most distant object in the universe -- a smudge 13 billion light-years away.

Hawaii's Gemini Observatory caught the image earlier this month after a satellite first detected the burst.

"Our infrared observations from Gemini immediately suggested that this was an unusually distant burst, these images were the smoking gun," said Edo Berger of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Distortions in the light signature of the object show it is 13 billion years old -- at the speed of light, 13 billion light-years away. A light-year is 6 trillion miles (10 trillion km).

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Peanut-shaped Stellar Explosion Spotted By Hubble

ScienceDaily (Apr. 25, 2009) — Using the NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), an international team of astronomers have taken the first optical images of a dramatic stellar outburst and discovered a peanut-shaped bubble expanding rapidly into space.

Team member Valerio Ribeiro, a graduate student from Liverpool John Moores University presented their results on Wednesday 22nd April at the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference at the University of Hertfordshire. Read more......

Scientists discover lightest exoplanet yet

The planet orbiting Gliese 581 has a mass twice that of Earth.
Provided by ESO
April 21, 2009 Well-known exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet "e" in the famous system Gliese 581 is only about twice the mass of Earth. The team also refined the orbit of the planet Gliese 581 d, first discovered in 2007, placing it well within the habitable zone, where liquid water oceans could exist. These amazing discoveries are the outcome of more than 4 years of observations using the most successful low-mass-exoplanet hunter in the world, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) spectrograph attached to the 3.6-meter European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescope at La Silla, Chile. Read More....