Hydrogen molecules may act as a kind of energy sink that strengthens the magnetic grip that causes sunspots, according to scientists from Hawaii and New Mexico using a new infrared instrument on an old telescope.

An international team of scientists has discovered a potentially habitable super-Earth orbiting a nearby star. The star is a member of a triple star system. The discovery demonstrates that habitable planets could form in a greater variety of environments than previously believed.

The Hubble Space Telescope has taken a picture of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1073 in the constellation of Cetus (The Sea Monster).

A camera aboard one of NASA's twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar spacecraft has returned its first unique view of the far side of the moon. MoonKAM, or Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students, will be used by students nationwide to select lunar images for study.

This new view shows a stellar nursery called NGC 3324. It was taken using the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2,2m telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. The intense ultraviolet radiation from several of NGC 3324's hot young stars causes the gas cloud to glow with rich colours and has carved out a cavity in the surrounding gas and dust.

The US Science Foundation has awarded astrophysicist Miguel Angel Aragon the Science Visualization Challenge prize for his visualisation of cosmos or rather the dark-matter distribution in cosmos