In the past several weeks three leading Armenian physicists have been receiving congratulations from their colleagues and friends after a transnational collaboration they are part of won a prestigious prize in the field of science.

An international team led by University of Sidney, Australia, astronomer Professor Peter Tuthill has announced the discovery of a new member in the pantheon of exotically beautiful celestial objects.

Earth and planetary scientists at Washington University in St. Louis are paving the way for a smooth landing on Mars for the Phoenix Mission scheduled to launch in August this year by making sure the set-down literally is not a rocky one.

In a galaxy far, far away, a massive star suffered a nasty double whammy. On Oct. 20, 2004, Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki saw the star let loose an outburst so bright that it was initially mistaken for a supernova. The star survived, but for only two years. On Oct. 11, 2006, professional and amateur astronomers witnessed the star actually blowing itself to smithereens as Supernova 2006jc.

ESA's Rosetta and NASA's New Horizons are working together in their joint campaign to observe Jupiter. A preliminary analysis of the data from Rosetta's Alice ultraviolet spectrometer indicates that the data quality is excellent and that good science is expected to follow.

Astronomers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have produced the first images of the sky from a prototype of the Long Wavelength Array (LWA), a revolutionary new radio telescope to be constructed in southwestern New Mexico. The images show emissions from the center of our Galaxy, a supermassive black hole, and the remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova over 300 years ago.

Combining precise observations obtained by ESO's Very Large Telescope with those gathered by a network of smaller telescopes, astronomers have described in unprecedented detail the double asteroid Antiope, which is shown to be a pair of rubble-pile chunks of material, of about the same size, whirling around one another in a perpetual pas de deux. The two components are egg-shaped despite their very small sizes.

A time-series of high-resolution spectra in the optical and ultraviolet has twice been obtained just a few minutes after the detection of a gamma-ray bust explosion in a distant galaxy. The international team of astronomers responsible for these observations derived new conclusive evidence about the nature of the surroundings of these powerful explosions linked to the death of massive stars.