Peter Higgs on life, the universe and everything(author unknown)

It's tough to send a crewed mission to an asteroid, so the US 2014 budget proposals will include funds to tow a space rock closer in – into lunar orbit    

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ESA's Herschel space observatory has provided the first images of a dust belt - produced by colliding comets or asteroids - orbiting a subgiant star known to host a planetary system.(author unknown)

The degree to which Mars' atmosphere has thinned over time is evident in exquisite new measurements from Nasa's Curiosity rover.(author unknown)

Watch an animation of a white dwarf bending a larger star's light, illustrating one of the first examples of the effect spotted by NASA's Kepler space telescope    

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has broken the record in the quest to find the furthest supernova of the type used to measure cosmic distances. This supernova exploded more than 10 billion years ago (redshift 1.914), at a time the Universe was in its early formative years and stars were being born at a rapid rate.(author unknown)

Dissolved in volcanic ponds, meteorites could have provided early life with the chemicals it needed to store energy    

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A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a star detonated with enough energy to briefly shine with an intrinsic brightness of one billion of our suns. The beacon of radiation arrived at Earth 10 billion years later and was captured in a Hubble Space Telescope deep survey of the universe. It is the farthest, and earliest, supernova of its type detected to date. More than simply an example of the ancient fireworks in the young and effervescent universe, the supernova belongs to a special class of stellar detonations that are so reliably bright, they can be used as intergalactic milepost markers.

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NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope has made the first detection of X-ray emission from young solar-type stars that lie outside our Milky Way galaxy. They live in a region known as the "Wing" of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. X-rays from young stars trace how active their magnetic fields are. Magnetic activity provides clues to a star's rotation rate and the rising and falling of hot gas in the star's interior. Astronomers suggest that if the X-ray properties of young stars are similar in different environments around our galaxy, then other related properties, such as the formation of planets, are also likely to be similar.

(author unknown)

Astrophysics: Fire in the hole!

Nature 496, 7443 (2013). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/496020a

Author: Zeeya Merali

Will an astronaut who falls into a black hole be crushed or burned to a crisp?

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has found the farthest supernova so far of the type used to measure cosmic distances. Supernova UDS10Wil, nicknamed SN Wilson after American President Woodrow Wilson, exploded more than 10 billion years ago.(author unknown)

A $2bn experiment on the space station makes some encouraging steps in the quest to understand dark matter, a mysterious component of the Universe.(author unknown)

From aboard the International Space Station, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer has seen what may be our first glimpse of dark matter

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The best map yet of light from the infant universe seems to rule out the strange motion of galaxy clusters, knocking down one sign of a multiverse

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Have scientists finally found dark matter? The Today programme's science correspondent Tom Feilden reports.(author unknown)

Against the law

Nature 496, 7443 (2013). doi:10.1038/496005b

Behaviours proposed for black holes conflict with the laws of physics.

The following is a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on the first Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) results announced Wednesday at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. AMS is a cosmic ray particle physics detector on the exterior of the International Space Station.(author unknown)

Cosmologists using data from ESA's Planck satellite have compiled the first all-sky image of the distribution of dark matter across the entire history of the Universe as seen projected on the sky. This is made possible by analysing the tiny distortions imprinted on the photons of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) by the gravitational lensing effect of massive cosmic structures. As photons travelled through these structures, which consist primarily of dark matter, their paths became bent, slightly changing the pattern of the CMB. Although noisy, this image is the first measurement performed over almost the whole sky of the gravitational potential that distorts the CMB, and is one of the highlights of Planck's cosmological results. With these unique data, cosmologists can investigate 13 billion years of the formation of structure in the Universe. The data agree very well with the expectations from the leading cosmological model that describes the origin and evolution of cosmic structure in the Universe.(author unknown)

Astronomers have watched as a black hole woke up from a decades-long slumber to feed on a low-mass object - either a brown dwarf or a giant planet - that strayed too close. A similar feeding event, albeit on a gas cloud, will soon happen at the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way Galaxy.(author unknown)

The Planck space mission has released the most accurate and detailed map ever made of the oldest light in the universe, revealing new information about its age, contents and origins.(author unknown)