Though astronomers generally believe most galaxies were built up by mergers of smaller galaxies, the new discovery suggests that at least a few galaxies formed quickly and wholly long ago. For such a large galaxy, this would have been a vastly explosive star birth event.

The striking picture reveals an eclectic mix of embryonic stars living in the tattered neighbourhood of one of the most famous massive stars in our Milky Way galaxy, Eta Carinae. Astronomers say that radiation and winds from Eta Carinae and its massive siblings ripped apart the surrounding cloud of gas and dust, shocking the new stars into being.

The balloon of gas and dust is an example of stimulated star formation. Such stars are born when the hot bubble expands into the interstellar gas and dust around it. RCW 79 has spawned at least two groups of new stars along the edge of the large bubble. Some are visible inside the small bubble in the lower left corner. Another group of baby stars appears near the opening at the top.

(Spitzer Space Telescope) NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted what may be the dusty spray of asteroids banging together in a belt that orbits a star like our Sun. The discovery offers astronomers a rare glimpse at a distant star system that resembles our home, and may represent a significant step toward learning if and where other Earths form.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, moderated the informal discussion. At issue was whether our solar system is special, why it looks the way it does, and how others thus far detected differ. The debate took place between theoretical and observational scientists on the different aspects of detecting and categorising alien solar systems. About 700 people attended the event.

Using the world's most powerful X-ray space observatory, the team is unravelling the complex interactions that take place in the "traffic pile-ups" that occur as clusters containing hundreds of galaxies and trillions of solar masses of gas and dark matter interact and merge.

According to a report from Space.com on April 7, 2005, the rebirth of an old star named V4334 SGR in the constellation Sagittarius, which was observed by using National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, has surprised researchers by flying through the process 100 times faster than predicted. The surprising rebirth forced researchers to produce new models of how such an old, white dwarf star could re-ignite its nuclear furnace for one final blast of energy.

Data from ISO, the infrared observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA), have provided the first direct evidence that shock waves generated by galaxy collisions excite the gas from which new stars will form. The result also provides important clues on how the birth of the first stars was triggered and sped up in the early Universe.

According to a Chandra X-Ray Centre News Release on March 23rd, 2005, peculiar outbursts of X-rays coming from a black hole in the galaxy Messier 74 (M74) have provided evidence that the black hole has a mass of about 10,000 Suns, which would place it in a possible new class of black holes. These outbursts were observed with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The Milky Way has several star clusters; collections of stars pulling each other into a tight group. But now astronomers have located a super star cluster, containing hundreds of thousands of stars in a region only 6 light-years across. It's called Westerlund 1, and nobody discovered it before now because it's hidden behind thick clouds of dust.

In the past few years, more and more of these types of findings have been recognised and reported. According to modern textbooks, these life forms are not possible because organisms cannot survive in such a hot, cold, profound depth on earth, or in highly salt-concentrated water and highly toxic places. Yet similar findings keep coming to the spotlight.

Powerful but unknown forces are at work in a small companion galaxy of the Milky Way, astronomers say in the latest issue of the journal Science. Something is keeping the structure and magnetic field of this galaxy (the Large Magellanic Cloud) strong and ordered, even while the Milky Way's gravity works to tear them apart.

The remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Africa. Pictured above is Fossil Reactor 15, located in Oklo, Gabon. Uranium oxide remains are visible as the yellowish rock. Oklo by-products are being used today to probe the stability of the fundamental constants over cosmological time-scales and to develop more effective means for disposing of human-manufactured nuclear waste.

The next step, according to Lai, is animal testing. Limited tests have been done in that area. In an earlier study, a dog with bone cancer so severe it couldn’t walk made a complete recovery in five days after receiving the treatment. But more rigorous testing is needed.

Just a decade ago, scientists knew of only the nine planets - those in our local solar system. In 1995, improved detection techniques produced the first solid evidence of a planet circling another star. A proliferation of discoveries followed, and now dozens of ongoing search efforts around the globe add steadily to the roster of worlds. Most of these planets differ markedly from the planets in our own solar system. They are more similar to Jupiter or Saturn than to Earth, and are considered unlikely to support life as we know it.

Brownlee told SPACE.com that Wild 2Â could represent a unique class of comet. He and his colleagues had expected it to be relatively featureless with a dusty, charcoal-like coating. Instead they found a place riddled with apparently ancient impact craters. Broad mesas and steep canyons stand out clearly.

Astronomers from Penn State and Caltech have found the smallest extrasolar planet yet, orbiting a pulsar 1,500 light-years away. The small planet - the fourth discovered around this pulsar - has 1/5th the mass of Pluto, and orbits approximately the same distance as the asteroid belt orbits the Sun.

Scientists in Spain have proposed, after years of research, that in 22 billion years, the universe will be torn to pieces in a so-called "Big Rip," as a result of the ongoing expansion of the universe. However, the Big Rip does not necessary bring the world to its very end. This is in sharp contrast to the suggestion brought out by an American scientist in early 2003, that the Big Rip is tantamount to the end of the world.

A New Scientist article on May 9th, 2004, reported that astronomers, "made their discovery while mapping the distribution of hydrogen gas within the Milky Way... The structure consists of an arc of hydrogen gas 77,000 light years long and a few thousand light years thick running along the galaxy's outermost edge," and that it "sweeps around outside the other arms."

We all know that expansion cannot be unlimited. Explosion will occur at a certain level of expansion. It is easy to see how balloons and tires expand and then explode. However, it isn't easy to discover expansion of a ring in the universe. Astronomers made a wonderful finding that news stars form after expanding rings explode.

Scientists have been tracking the transformations of new galaxies. In late 2004, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that amidst the ancient galaxies surrounding our Milky Way, dozens of infant galaxies are emerging. These galaxies are about 1 billion light years away from us, but they are 9 billion light years closer to us than any other galaxies. Researchers are thrilled by this observation, since the birth of galaxies was thought to happen only billions of years ago.

Decades ago, it was physicist Enrico Fermi who pondered the issue of extraterrestrial civilisations with fellow theorists over lunch, generating the famous quip: "Where are they?" That question later became central to debates about the cosmological census count of other star folk and possible extraterrestrial (ET) visitors from afar.

String theory emerged in the 1980s as a way to answer questions that still baffle modern physics, such as why gravity is so much weaker than other fundamental forces? By imagining that everything is composed entirely of strings ten billion billion times smaller than atomic nuclei, theoretical physicists were able to create a model of the universe.

These galaxies appear to be more fully formed and mature than expected at this early stage in the evolution of the Universe. This finding is similar to a teacher walking into a classroom expecting to greet a room full of unruly teenagers and finding well-groomed young adults.

The strong warping of the disk indicates that ESO 510-G13 has recently undergone a collision with a nearby galaxy and is in the process of swallowing it. Gravitational forces distort the structures of the galaxies as their stars, gas, and dust merge together in a process that takes millions of years. Eventually the disturbances will die out, and ESO 510-G13 will become a normal-appearing single galaxy.

Astronomers are using a wide range of telescopes and analysis techniques to conduct a "CSI" or Crime Scene Investigator-style look at what is happening to this galaxy inside its cluster's rough neighbourhood. "It's a clear case of galaxy assault and battery," says William Keel of the University of Alabama. "This is the first time we have a full suite of results from such disparate techniques showing the crime being committed, and the modus operandi."

In February of 2004, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) issued an announcement that dark energy indeed exists. According to observation, nearly all galaxies in the universe are receding from our galaxy at an ever-increasing pace. Astronomers think, based on the present understanding, our galaxy will become lonelier.

Chinese chemists synthesised Han Purple pigment from barium copper silicates for the first time roughly 2,000 years ago and used the pigments for pottery and trade, in addition to large imperial projects such as the Qin Terracotta Warriors of Xi'an in Shaanxi Province. Preceding the invention of both paper and the compass, the ancient creation of Han Purple possibly makes it the first man-made compound containing a metallic bond.

In one discovery, astronomers have detected a faint, star-like object in the least expected of places -- a "starless core." Named for their apparent lack of stars, starless cores are dense knots of gas and dust that should eventually form individual newborn stars.

An international team of scientists, led by a NASA-funded researcher, announced today, they observed a nearby head-on collision of two galaxy clusters. The clusters smashed together thousands of galaxies and trillions of stars. It is one of the most powerful events ever witnessed. Such collisions are second only to the Big Bang in total energy output.

During the past ten years, astronomers have confirmed that the Solar System is not unique because they have now discovered over 120 giant planets orbiting other stars. It is a rare discovery to find new planets, not to mention giant planets that orbit extremely close to their parent stars. Astronomers have not been able to explain this strange phenomenon.

For the first time, NASA’s Space Infrared Telescope (the Spitzer Space Telescope) has discovered two of the farthest seen planets that have formed protoplanetary disc's (or planet-forming disc's) within RCW 49. They each surround over 300 newborn stars. This new photo taken by Spitzer displays, in astonishing detail, this nebula for the first time.

“These rectangular structures are surrounded by concentric circles. This agrees with Plato’s description that the temples were surrounded by concentric circles of water and earth. Even the sizes are correct. According to Plato, the diameter of the largest circle was 27 stades, i.e. 5 kilometres. In the satellite photos, the diameter of the largest circle is between 5 and 6 kilometres,” Kuhne told Discovery News.