Astronomy: New distance record for galaxies

Nature 502, 7472 (2013). doi:10.1038/502459a

Authors: Dominik A. Riechers

Spectroscopic measurements of 43 candidates for distant galaxies have confirmed one to be the most remote galaxy securely identified to date — and it forms stars more than 100 times faster than the Milky Way. See Letter p.524

Due to recently-discovered technical issues, ESA has decided to perform additional verifications on its Gaia satellite, and therefore we have requested that Arianespace postpone the Gaia launch, currently scheduled for November 20, 2013. A new launch date will be announced as soon as the availability of the satellite is confirmed.

The number of observed exoplanets - those orbiting distant stars - passes 1,000 and of these, 12 might be habitable, scientists claim.

Final word is near on dark-matter signal

Nature 502, 7472 (2013). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/502421a

Author: Eugenie Samuel Reich

An influential US experiment prepares to release its first results.

ESA's billion-star surveyor Gaia will be launched from Europe's spaceport in Kourou on 20 November to begin a five-year mission to map the stars with unprecedented precision.

A lack of impact craters in the lowlands of Saturn's largest moon hint at extensive wetlands fed by underground springs of liquid hydrocarbons
    

From the tiniest fraction of a second after the Big Bang to the evolution of stars and galaxies over 13.8 billion years, ESA's Planck space telescope has provided new insight into the history of our Universe. Although science observations are now complete, the legacy of the Planck mission lives on.

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A new image of the sunward plunging Comet ISON taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on October 9, 2013, suggests that the comet is intact despite some predictions that the fragile icy nucleus might disintegrate as the Sun warms it. The comet will pass closest to the Sun on November 28.
On Thursday, October 17 at 4pm EDT there will be a live chat event with Hubble's comet scientists to discuss the new image and latest research findings on ISON. Visit: https://plus.google.com/events/c4te7qh2fo468ke9uou3e3rbr3s .

A 570-kilogram hunk of the meteor that lit up the skies over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February has been dredged up from a lake
    

An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet - a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. But it also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky - or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early Universe.

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An international team of astronomers has found the most distant gravitational lens yet a galaxy that, as predicted by Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, deflects and intensifies the light of an even more distant object. The discovery provides a rare opportunity to directly measure the mass of a distant galaxy. The observation also poses a mystery: lenses of this kind should be exceedingly rare. Given this and other recent finds, astronomers either have been phenomenally lucky or, more likely, they have underestimated substantially the number of small, very young galaxies in the early universe.

Two international teams of astronomers have used the power of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to focus on jets from the huge black holes at the centres of galaxies and observe how they affect their surroundings. They have respectively obtained the best view yet of the molecular gas around a nearby, quiet black hole and caught an unexpected glimpse of the base of a powerful jet close to a distant black hole.