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Searching for Life in Universe

A lunar eclipse helped a group of international scientists take a snapshot of earth's chemical fingerprint, which could help to identify planets most similar to earth where life may be thriving.

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NASA balloon mission tunes in to a cosmic radio mystery

Listening to the early universe just got harder. A team led by Alan Kogut of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., today announced the discovery of cosmic radio noise that booms six times louder than expected.

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Coordinating international observatories in white-dwarf watch

Judi Provencal is star-struck, but not so much by the glitz and glam of Hollywood.

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Voyager 2 proves solar system is squashed

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has followed its twin Voyager 1 into the solar system's final frontier, a vast region at the edge of our solar system where the solar wind runs up against the thin gas between the stars.

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Engineers develop software solution for complex space missions

Sending an unmanned spacecraft to the outer fringes of the solar system requires extensive planning.

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Hubble, Spitzer Space Telescopes find 'Lego-block' galaxies in early universe

The conventional model for galaxy evolution predicts that small galaxies in the early Universe evolved into the massive galaxies of today by coalescing. Nine Lego-like “building block” galaxies initially detected by Hubble likely contributed to the construction of the Universe as we know it.

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New Wide Field Near-Infrared Imager for ESO's Very Large Telescope

Europe's flagship ground-based astronomical facility, the ESO VLT, has been equipped with a new 'eye' to study the Universe. Working in the near-infrared, the new instrument - dubbed HAWK-I - covers about 1/10th the area of the Full Moon in a single exposure. It is uniquely suited to the discovery and study of faint objects, such as distant galaxies or small stars and planets.

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Scientists conduct most detailed cosmological simulation to date

By incorporating the physics of black holes into a highly sophisticated model running on a powerful supercomputing system, an international team of scientists has produced an unprecedented simulation of cosmic evolution that verifies and deepens our understanding of relationships between black holes and the galaxies in which they reside.

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Neutron stars join the black hole jet set

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has revealed an X-ray jet blasting away from a neutron star in a binary system. This discovery may help astronomers understand how neutron stars as well as black holes can generate powerful beams of relativistic particles.

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COROT discovers its first exoplanet and catches scientists by surprise

COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of 'seismic' information on a far away, Sun-like star- with unexpected accuracy.

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X-ray satellites catch magnetar

Astronomers using data from several X-ray satellites have caught a magnetar - the remnant of a massive star with an incredibly strong magnetic field - in a sort of giant cosmic blench.

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Reaching parts - with Herschel and SPIRE

A UK-led instrument which will study a previously unexplored part of the Universe leaves the UK this week to be installed on the European Space Agency's Herschel spacecraft in Germany.

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