ESO's Very Large Telescope has been used to create the first ever map of the weather on the surface of the nearest brown dwarf to Earth. An international team has made a chart of the dark and light features on WISE J104915.57-531906.1B, which is informally known as Luhman 16B and is one of two recently discovered brown dwarfs forming a pair only six light-years from the Sun. The new results are being published in the 30 January 2014 issue of the journal Nature.

A telescope to find thousands of planets beyond our Solar System is the hot favourite for selection as Europe's next medium-class space science mission.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Europe's Herschel Space Observatory have pieced together the evolutionary sequence of compact elliptical galaxies that erupted and burned out early in the history of the universe.

Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and Europe's Herschel Space Observatory have pieced together the evolutionary sequence of compact elliptical galaxies that erupted and burned out early in the history of the universe.

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A certain class of massive galaxies in the early universe lived fast and died young. By "died" astronomers mean that the galaxies had completed building stars just 3 billion years after the big bang. By contrast, our 12-billion-year-old Milky Way galaxy continues making stars today. When star formation stops, the aging stellar population looks redder in the star-forming galaxies that are more bluish. The nickname for the essentially "burned-out" galaxies is "red and dead."

Following last week's wake-up of the Rosetta comet-chaser, ESA's flight controllers have conducted the first in a series of health checks aimed at assessing how well it came through 31 months of hibernation.

Astrophysics: Portrait of a dynamic neighbour

Nature 505, 7485 (2014). doi:10.1038/505625a

Authors: Adam P. Showman

Brown dwarfs are celestial objects that lack the mass to become fully fledged stars. High-resolution maps of one such object add to the evidence that these exotic worlds have highly dynamic weather and climate. See Letter p.654

Solar System evolution from compositional mapping of the asteroid belt

Nature 505, 7485 (2014). doi:10.1038/nature12908

Authors: F. E. DeMeo & B. Carry

Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt have been discovered to be more compositionally diverse with size and distance from the Sun than had previously been known. This implies substantial mixing through processes such as planetary migration and the subsequent dynamical processes.

A global cloud map of the nearest known brown dwarf

Nature 505, 7485 (2014). doi:10.1038/nature12955

Authors: I. J. M. Crossfield, B. Biller, J. E. Schlieder, N. R. Deacon, M. Bonnefoy, D. Homeier, F. Allard, E. Buenzli, Th. Henning, W. Brandner, B. Goldman & T. Kopytova

Brown dwarfs—substellar bodies more massive than planets but not massive enough to initiate the sustained hydrogen fusion that powers self-luminous stars—are born hot and slowly cool as they age. As they cool below about 2,300 kelvin, liquid or crystalline particles composed of calcium aluminates, silicates and iron condense into atmospheric ‘dust’, which disappears at still cooler temperatures (around 1,300 kelvin). Models to explain this dust dispersal include both an abrupt sinking of the entire cloud deck into the deep, unobservable atmosphere and breakup of the cloud into scattered patches (as seen on Jupiter and Saturn). However, hitherto observations of brown dwarfs have been limited to globally integrated measurements, which can reveal surface inhomogeneities but cannot unambiguously resolve surface features. Here we report a two-dimensional map of a brown dwarf’s surface that allows identification of large-scale bright and dark features, indicative of patchy clouds. Monitoring suggests that the characteristic timescale for the evolution of global weather patterns is approximately one day.

Blobby galaxies with long glowing tendrils of stars could help explain why spiral galaxies are unusually rare in large clusters
    

Stephen Hawking has changed his mind about what black holes are – not for the first time. Take a journey through the biggest shifts in black hole lore
    

US struggles to offload telescopes

Nature 505, 7485 (2014). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/505594a

Author: Alexandra Witze

West Virginia radio observatory seeks money from partners to fend off closure by the National Science Foundation.

LJ Rich finds how to photograph the stars without the need for expensive equipment.

The world's most famous living scientist has a new mind-bending theory about black holes. Rather than getting sucked into a singularity of confusion, read our explainer
    

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has passed its first significant mission milestone for 2014 -- a Spacecraft Critical Design Review (SCDR) that examined the telescope's power, communications and pointing control systems.

The closest supernova seen for several decades has been spotted by students at University College London.

Scientists using the Herschel space observatory have made the first definitive detection of water vapor on the largest and roundest object in the asteroid belt, dwarf planet Ceres.

The nearest exploding star detected since 1987 could offer insights into dark energy, ghostly neutrinos, and even how the universe's story will play out
    

Take a dip in the Lagoon Nebula, a stellar nursery where bright new stars are being formed
    

ESA's Herschel space observatory has discovered water vapour around Ceres, the first unambiguous detection of water vapour around an object in the asteroid belt.