An artist's conception of the distant planet.

A remarkable planetary system around a red dwarf star, called Gliese 581, seems to have at least three planets. One planet, close to the parent star, appears to be five times the mass of Earth and only 1.5 times its radius. It whizzes around the star in only 13 days! Most intriguingly, its position could mean that its temperatures would be mild enough to allow liquid water to exist. This is the first Earth-like planet found in that important range, known as the “habitable zone.”

• The European Southern Observatory news release on the habitable zone planet.

Where scientists find galaxies, they find blobs of dark matter. Recently, astronomers discovered something unique – a ring of dark matter within a cluster of galaxies. Scientists believe the ring formed when galaxies smashed into one another. It’s the first time scientists have observed dark matter reacting to gravitational forces, just like normal matter.

Did Hubble find water vapor on a planet beyond our solar system? One scientist’s theoretical model says it did. Scientists are always excited about the possibility of finding water on another planet, since it’s one of the three things we believe is necessary for life, along with carbon and energy. Carbon and oxygen has also been detected already in the planet’s atmosphere.

• Hubble Finds Ring of Dark Matter
• Lowell Observatory's news release on its discovery.

An artist's illustration of the explosion (top) and actual telescope observations (bottom).

Astronomers have detected one of the brightest supernova ever seen and surmised that the star that exploded may have been 150 times the mass of the Sun. The exploding star, 240 million light years away in galaxy NGC 1260, swiftly became the object of scrutiny by the orbiting Chandra X-ray Telescope as well as a number of ground-based telescopes. Before the explosion, the star ejected a great deal of mass. Scientists have seen this behavior in another star – Eta Carinae, in our own Milky Way Galaxy.

• NASA talks about Chandra's observations.
• Associated Press story on the supernova.

Artist's rendition of complete ALMA array.

A new radio telescope array is under construction in one of Earth’s most inaccessible places. The telescope, called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), is located in Chile’s mountainous Atacama Desert at an altitude of 16,500 feet. The wavelengths the telescope will be observing are absorbed by moisture in the atmosphere, so the dry, high-altitude desert air is essential for the telescope to work. The array will not be complete until 2012, but some of its components have recently undergone successful critical tests in New Mexico.

• The European Southern Observatory's ALMA Web site.
• ALMA's Web site at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO).
• The Very Large Array's Web site.

Image of Jupiter aurora while New Horizons passes near.

The satellite New Horizons is headed to Pluto. Launched in January 2006, it is destined to arrive at Pluto in 2015. What is it doing along the way? It received a gravity assist to send it in the right direction at Jupiter and it also snapped imagery of Jupiter and its satellite Io. Also, the Hubble Space Telescope is working with the New Horizons mission, obtaining complementary images from Hubble’s vantage point, in orbit around the Earth.

• Picture of Io from New Horizons.
• Depiction of New Horizons passing by Jupiter.
• Hubble Monitors Jupiter in Support of the New Horizons Flyby.

Hubble has stared into the Carina Nebula to view star formation in intense detail. Stellar winds and ultraviolet radiation from the giant stars that have formed in the nebula are shredding the surrounding gas that contributed to their formation. Some of the stars are at least 50 to 100 times the mass of the Sun. Our Sun and solar system may have formed from a similar situation 4.6 billion years ago.

At least 50,000 galaxies have turned up in another Hubble image, revealing new information about the universe’s younger days. The panoramic Hubble image shows groupings and scatterings of galaxies. Among the distinctive ones are a giant red galaxy with a duo of black holes at its center and a number of new “gravitational lenses,” or places where the gravity from a galaxy cluster bends and magnifies objects beyond it. The Hubble image is part of a larger project to study galaxies in a small but representative area of the sky, in order to get an idea of what the universe looks like in all directions.

• The Carina Nebula: Starbirth in the Extreme
• Hubble Pans Across Heavens to Harvest 50,000 Evolving Galaxies

A model of the Sputnik probe.

This year marks a momentous anniversary in the history of space exploration. It is both the 150th birthday of the Russian space visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first Earth-orbiting satellite. The man most responsible for that historic accomplishment is Sergey Korolyov, almost completely unheard of during his lifetime but now recognized as the man who likely sparked the competition between the former Soviet Union and United States to succeed in space, known as the space race.

• Russian Space Web gives a short biography of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
• Web site of the Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Museum.
• The Space Review talks about Sergey Korolyov.
• The BBC discuses Korolyov's history.
• NASA on the Sputnik probe.

The Cat's Eye nebula is one of the most complex nebulae discovered.

Planetary nebulae form when a Sun-sized star dies, ejecting clouds of gas and dust into space. In fact, when our Sun ends its life, it will be as a planetary nebula. Scientists are trying to discover how such dying stars form the complex, colorful structures of nebulae. If they can discover how the process works, it will help explain how the elements in stars find their way into space, and then into new star systems and planets.

• Space.com talks about how nebulae form.