A new moon has been discovered orbiting Saturn, which brings the number of satellites known to be spinning around the ringed giant to an impressive 60. The discovery was made by the Cassini Imaging Team studying images taken by the Cassini spacecraft back in May this year.
The moon has not been officially named as yet [...]

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Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer space telescope have detected water vapour in the atmosphere of extrasolar planet HD 189733b. The planet is far from being habitable though with an average temperature of about 1000 degrees Kelvin, however the discovery has led scientists to believe that water is more common out there in the Universe than was [...]

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It may or may not be the answer to life, the Universe and everything, but coincidentally 42 is the mass of our galaxy, 3 x 10 to the power of 42 kilograms to be more precise.
The mass of the Milky Way Galaxy was determined by an international team of scientists and presented this week at [...]

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This is a vid on the Pale Blue Dot, an iconic image captured by the Voyager 1 spacecraft from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometres (4 billion miles) on February 14, 1990.
The vid has been put together by aspiring film maker David Fu and it’s a great piece of work. Carl Sagan’s narration is [...]

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NASA says that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is on track for launch in 2013. The new telescope will replace the awesome Hubble telescope which has been responsible for a multitude of scientific discoveries and has captured countless amazing images of our universe since its launch in 1990. The JWST will be siginificantly larger [...]

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China and Russia are planning a joint mission to Mars with a launch date in May 2009. The mission will use a Russian booster to send a Chinese satellite and a Russian probe dubbed “Phobos explorer” to the red planet. After a 10 month journey the plan is for the Chinese satellite to enter Martian [...]

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Scientists believe they may have spotted caves in images taken by Nasa’s Odyssey spacecraft which is in orbit around the red planet. Seven potential caves have been identified on the side of the Arsia Mons volcano with entrances varying in size between 100m and 252m wide. In one of the images the floor of the [...]

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The image of Io above was taken by the New Horizons probe as it recently sped through the Jupiter system on it’s way to Pluto. The image was taken with the spacecrafts Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) from a distance of 2.5 million kilometers. Clearly visible in the 11 o’clock position of the Jovian moon [...]

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This is bad news, the main camera on the Hubble Space Telescope has shut down after its backup power supply failed and probably will never be fully working again. The camera, called the Advanced Camera for Surveys, is the most used instrument on the Hubble Telescope and the best scenario scientists are now hoping for [...]

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With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.
This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three [...]

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Are we alone in the Universe? That seems very unlikely if you do the math: Our galaxy contains 200 - 400 billion stars and is one of several hundred billion galaxies in the observable Universe. These numbers are huge, and as a consequence even if an infinitesimally small percentage of star systems possess planets capable [...]

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Rense.com has a good series of images showing the relative scale of astromonical objects. Included are planets in our solar system up to some of the largest stars known, such as Antares which makes our Sun look like a midget.
Link

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