An international team of astronomers with the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey announce today the discovery of TrES-4, a new extrasolar planet in the constellation of Hercules. The new planet was identified by astronomers looking for transiting planets – that is, planets that pass in front of their home star – using a network of small automated telescopes in Arizona, California, and the Canary Islands.

Queen guitarist Brian May has handed in his doctoral thesis, more than 30 years after first starting the academic dissertation on a highly specialised area of astronomy.

A planet orbiting a giant red star has been discovered by an astronomy team led by Penn State's Alex Wolszczan, who in 1992 discovered the first planets ever found outside our solar system.

Supermassive black holes have been discovered to grow more rapidly in young galaxy clusters, according to new results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. These "fast-track" supermassive black holes can have a big influence on the galaxies and clusters that they live in.

In the 40 years that humans have been traveling into space, the suits they wear have changed very little. The bulky, gas-pressurized outfits give astronauts a bubble of protection, but their significant mass and the pressure itself severely limit mobility.

A unique set of observations, obtained with ESO's VLT, has allowed astronomers to find direct evidence for the material that surrounded a star before it exploded as a Type Ia supernova. This strongly supports the scenario in which the explosion occurred in a system where a white dwarf is fed by a red giant.

Water has been discovered on a planet outside our solar system for the first time - giving scientists a tantalising hint of life existing beyond the Earth.

In a paper published in The Astronomical Journal Dr. Xiaolei Zhang, of the Naval Research Laboratory, and Dr. Ronald J. Buta, of the University of Alabama, report that they have developed an accurate and widely-applicable method for characterizing density wave features in galaxies.

Astronomy is entering a new golden age of discovery led by breakthroughs in telescopes and instruments making them capable of observing distant events early in the life of the universe. There is now great optimism that one of the fundamental questions of cosmology, the origin of galaxies, will be resolved within the next decade or sooner.

Columbia University Astronomer Offers New Theory Into 400-year-old Lunar Mystery.

Atlantis shuttle launch time is on June 8, at 7:38 p.m. EDT. The website of NASA (nasa.gov) provides live coverage of Atlantis shuttle launch.

Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing a special feature this week dedicated to the XMM-Newton extended survey of the Taurus molecular cloud. One of the main results is the identification of unusual physical processes not known before in forming stars. These unprecedented observations suggest that the gas streams falling down onto the forming star and the jets being ejected from it both play major roles in the production of X-rays.