The US space agency's mission to Pluto is about to take its first pictures of the mysterious icy world.

Nasa's mission to Pluto gets under way in earnest as the New Horizons probe starts taking the pictures needed for July's close fly-by.

Rosetta is revealing its host comet as having a remarkable array of surface features and with many processes contributing to its activity, painting a complex picture of its evolution.

Any event that creates photons may leave a kind of electromagnetic echo. If so, echoes from the big bang itself may still be detectable

The first big batch of science results from the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft are just out. Here's our pick of the bunch.

Scientists working on Europe's Rosetta mission say they may have found evidence for how comets are formed.

NASA and Microsoft have teamed up to develop software called OnSight, a new technology that will enable scientists to work virtually on Mars using wearable technology called Microsoft HoloLens.

Researchers have decoded ancient recordings from fragments of an asteroid dating back billions of years to the start of the Solar System.

Crunch time for pet theory on dark matter

Nature 517, 7535 (2015). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/517422a

Author: Davide Castelvecchi

Thought to make up the Universe’s missing matter, WIMPs are running out of places to hide.

Astronomy: Cosmic fog and smog

Nature 517, 7535 (2015). doi:10.1038/517444a

Authors: Molly S. Peeples

It emerges that most of the elements heavier than helium are not found in galaxies, where they can be mixed into future stars and planets. Instead, these elements largely reside far from galaxies in ionized gas and dust particles.

Astronomy: Laser focus

Nature 517, 7535 (2015). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/517430a

Author: Ann Finkbeiner

By firing lasers into the sky, Claire Max has transformed the capabilities of current — and future — telescopes.

The International Astronomical Union's exoplanet-naming scheme may accidentally let Japanese astronomy clubs make the most suggestions for possible planet names

In the past year, the seventh planet has sported huge cloud systems so bright they could be seen by amateur astronomers on Earth, but no one knows the cause

The American space agency's Dawn spacecraft is bearing down on Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

They're over in a flash, but a mega-powerful radio burst has finally been spotted in real time, rather than in old data, giving clues to their mysterious origin

The way some images have been drip-fed from the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission at Comet 67P should prompt a rethink on data policies, the organisation's chief says.

The UK-led Beagle-2 Mars lander, which hitched a ride on ESA's Mars Express mission and was lost on Mars since 2003, has been found in images taken by a NASA orbiter at the Red Planet.

High-resolution images taken from orbit identify the landing location of the lost Beagle2 probe, and it appears to be in one piece.

Two teams of astronomers led by researchers at the University of Cambridge have looked back nearly 13 billion years, when the Universe was less than 10 percent its present age, to determine how quasars – extremely luminous objects powered by supermassive black holes with the mass of a billion suns – regulate the formation of stars and the build-up of the most massive galaxies.

Using a combination of data gathered from powerful radio telescopes and supercomputer simulations, the teams found that a quasar spits out cold gas at speeds up to 2000 kilometres per second, and across distances of nearly 200,000 light years – much farther than has been observed before.

How this cold gas - the raw material for star formation in galaxies - can be accelerated to such high speeds had remained a mystery. Detailed comparison of new observations and supercomputer simulations has only now allowed researchers to understand how this can happen: the gas is first heated to temperatures of tens of millions of degrees by the energy released by the supermassive black hole powering the quasar. This enormous build-up of pressure accelerates the hot gas and pushes it to the outskirts of the galaxy.

The supercomputer simulations show that on its way out of the parent galaxy, there is just enough time for some of the hot gas to cool to temperatures low enough to be observable with radio telescopes. The results are presented in two separate papers published today (16 January) in the journals Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Quasars are amongst the most luminous objects in the Universe, and the most distant quasars are so far away that they allow us to peer back billions of years in time. They are powered by supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies, surrounded by a rapidly spinning disk-like region of gas. As the black hole pulls in matter from its surroundings, huge amounts of energy are released.

“It is the first time that we have seen outflowing cold gas moving at these large speeds at such large distances from the supermassive black hole,” said Claudia Cicone, a PhD student at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and lead author on the first of the two papers. “It is very difficult to have matter with temperatures this low move as fast as we observed.”

Cicone’s observations allowed the second team of researchers specialising in supercomputer simulations to develop a detailed theoretical model of the outflowing gas around a bright quasar.

“We found that while gas is launched out of the quasar at very high temperatures, there is enough time for some of it to cool through radiative cooling – similar to how the Earth cools down on a cloudless night,” said Tiago Costa, a PhD student at the Institute of Astronomy and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology, and lead author on the second paper. “The amazing thing is that in this distant galaxy in the young Universe the conditions are just right for enough of the fast moving hot gas to cool to the low temperatures that Claudia and her team have found.”

Working at the IRAM Plateau De Bure interferometer in the French Alps, the researchers gathered data in the millimetre band, which allows observation of the emission from the cold gas which is the primary fuel for star formation and main ingredient of galaxies, but is almost invisible at other wavelengths.

The research was supported by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Isaac Newton Trust and the European Research Council (ERC). The computer simulations were run using the Computer Cluster DARWIN, operated by the University of Cambridge High Performance Computing Service, as part of STFCs DiRAC supercomputer facility.

Inset image: Comparison of observation and simulations. Credit: Tiago Costa

Astronomers have been able to peer back to the young Universe to determine how quasars – powered by supermassive black holes with the mass of a billion suns – form and shape the evolution of galaxies.

While gas is launched out of the quasar at very high temperatures, there is enough time for some of it to cool through radiative cooling – similar to how the Earth cools down on a cloudless nightTiago CostaTiago CostaIllustration of the outflow (red) and gas flowing in to the quasar in the centre (blue). The cold clumps shown in the inset image are expelled out of the galaxy in a 'galactic hailstorm'

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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft recently began its long-awaited, historic encounter with Pluto. The spacecraft is entering the first of several approach phases that culminate July 14 with the first close-up flyby of the dwarf planet, 4.67 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) from Earth.