NASA's Cassini spacecraft has spotted a gigantic hurricane swirling inside a mysterious, six-sided weather pattern known as "the hexagon" at Saturn's north pole.(author unknown)

The liquid helium coolant that enabled instruments on board the Herschel space observatory to collect extraordinary images and spectra has finally run out. Launched in 2009, the ESA mission collected unprecedented data of the cool as well as of the distant Universe. Herschel's observations have exceeded expectations, enabling scientists to learn more about how stars form, about the rates of star formation in galaxies across the cosmos, and about the origin and presence of water in different celestial bodies. While observations have come to an end and the spacecraft is to be propelled to a stable parking orbit around the Sun, where it will remain indefinitely, the science mission will continue for several years with many discoveries still to be made in the treasure trove of images and spectra collected by the observatory.(author unknown)

The flagship Herschel telescope, the most powerful infrared observatory ever put into orbit, has run out of coolant and stopped working.(author unknown)

The Herschel observatory, a European space telescope for which NASA helped build instruments and process data, has stopped making observations after running out of liquid coolant as expected.(author unknown)

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids crashing into Saturn's rings and breaking into streams of rubble.(author unknown)

Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have shown for the first time that bursts of star formation have a major impact far beyond the boundaries of their host galaxy. These energetic events can affect galactic gas at distances of up to twenty times greater than the visible size of the galaxy - altering how the galaxy evolves, and how matter and energy is spread throughout the Universe.(author unknown)

Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope, along with radio telescopes around the world, to find and study a bizarre stellar pair consisting of the most massive neutron star confirmed so far, orbited by a white dwarf star. This strange new binary allows tests of Einstein’s theory of gravity — general relativity — in ways that were not possible up to now. So far the new observations exactly agree with the predictions from general relativity and are inconsistent with some alternative theories. The results will appear in the journal Science on 26 April 2013.(author unknown)

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings.(author unknown)

Saturn and Earth are having a close encounter. See the ringed planet at its best and brightest on April 28th.(author unknown)

Two high-energy particles glimpsed by the IceCube neutrino detector may be opening the door on a new way of exploring the universe    

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Nasa has released time-lapse images of the Sun filmed over thee years from a spacecraft.(author unknown)

A new map shows how the stuff of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 has spread around the gas giant's atmosphere since it struck Jupiter nearly 20 years ago    

(author unknown)

Later this year, Comet ISON is expected to become a naked-eye object when it skims through the atmosphere of the sun. The Hubble Space Telescope has just obtained a sneak preview.(author unknown)

Astronomy: Dusty galaxies come into view

Nature 496, 7446 (2013). doi:10.1038/496401d

Astronomers have made their first statistically reliable survey of one kind of star-forming galaxy in the early Universe.Knowledge of these distant objects is important for our understanding of these galaxies' formation and evolution, but enshrouding dust usually obscures their details — making them hard

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Comet ISON is potentially the "comet of the century" because around the time the comet makes its closest approach to the Sun, on November 28, it may briefly become brighter than the full Moon. Right now the comet is far below naked-eye visibility, and so Hubble was used to snap the view of the approaching comet, which is presently hurtling toward the Sun at approximately 47,000 miles per hour. When the Hubble picture was taken on April 10, the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter's orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the Sun. Even at that great distance the Sun is warming the comet enough to trigger outgassing from its frozen gases locked up in the solid nucleus. Hubble photographed a jet blasting dust particles off the sunward-facing side of the comet's nucleus. Preliminary measurements from the Hubble images suggest that the nucleus of ISON is no larger than three or four miles across. The comet was discovered in September 2012 by the Russian-led International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) using a 16-inch telescope.

(author unknown)

Astronomers have finally found direct proof that almost all water present in Jupiter's stratosphere was delivered by comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which struck the planet in 1994. The result is based on new data from Herschel that revealed more water in Jupiter's southern hemisphere, where the impacts occurred, than in the north as well as probing the vertical distribution of water in the planet's stratosphere.(author unknown)

Moon and planet names spark battle

Nature 496, 7446 (2013). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/496407a

Author: Alexandra Witze

Company clashes with International Astronomical Union over popular labels for exoplanets.

Housed 1400 metres underground in the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, DarkSide-50 looks for the telltale signs of a dark matter strike    

(author unknown)

The Kepler space telescope has revealed three worlds suited to life – two are in one solar system, so any inhabitants could already have found each other    

(author unknown)