Hubble 'sees new planets form'

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com The Hubble space telescope has produced the clearest evidence yet that a solar system like our own is forming around another star. It has photographed two disks of dust, one inclined to the other, around one of the closest stars to the sun. Astronomers studying the unique image of Beta Pictoris, 63 light years away, believe it contains at least one planet the size of Jupiter and possibly others like the Earth. They say our own solar system must have formed in a similar way which explains why the orbits of some planets are slightly skewed compared to the Earth's orbit. Astronomers knew that one disk of dust surrounded the star, which is in the southern constellation of Pictor. They have suspected for ten years that what appeared to be a kink in it was in fact a second dust disk inclined at about four degrees to the first. The Hubble observation, made with the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys, blocked out the star's own light with a coronograph to cause an artificial eclipse. This removed the glare and allowed the faint disks to become visible. The secondary disk is visible out to 24 billion miles from Beta Pictoris and may extend even further. Astronomers say that the best explanation for the observations is that an unseen planet, up to 20 times as massive as Jupiter, is in orbit within the second disk and sweeping up material from the first. Beta Pictoris is much younger than the Sun, twice as massive and nine times more luminous. The international study, revealed in the Astronomical Journal, was led by David Golimowski of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He said: "The finding suggests that planets could be forming in two different planes. We know this can happen because the planets in our solar system are typically inclined to Earth's orbit by several degrees. Perhaps stars forming more than one dust disk may be the norm in the formative years of a star system." The camera used in the discovery stopped working last week and Nasa are currently trying to reactivate it. Astronomers first suspected that Beta Pictoris was ringed with warm dust more than 20 years ago after a satellite detected more infrared radiation being emitted than expected.

Asteroid to skim past Earth

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com An asteroid up to half a mile wide will skim past the Earth on Monday in one of the closest near misses ever recorded. The giant space rock, labelled XP14, was detected by a robot telescope scouring the skies for possible deadly hazards. It will pass our planet at a distance of just over a quarter of a million miles - a close shave on the cosmic scale of things. The asteroid, first detected in December 2004, will pass close enough for amateur astronomers on the west coast of America to spot it in their backyard telescopes. XP14 is one of the Apollo group of asteroids which are termed "potentially hazardous objects" because their orbits cross that of the Earth. But there is no danger of an Armageddon-style collision this time round. XP14 was spotted by the automatic Lincoln Laboratory Near Earth Asteroid Research telescope (LINEAR) in New Mexico. It will pass closest to Earth around dawn UK time on Monday at a distance of 268,624 miles. Nasa scientists plan to use the 230ft Goldstone radar dish in California's Mojave Desert to bounce signals off the asteroid and determine its size more accurately. Similar radar observations will be made by astronomers at Evpatoria in the Ukraine.

Hubble camera stops working

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Nasa engineers are desperately trying to discover why a camera has stopped working on the Hubble space telescope. The orbiting eye has taken some of the most stunning pictures ever of the heavens. But it suddenly shut down last week and has so far failed to recover. Experts at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore believe that the Advanced Camera for Surveys has suffered a problem with its power supply. If they are correct, they hope to be able to switch to an alternative electronics system and get it working again on Friday. Max Mutcheler, of the STScI, said the camera had stopped operating and put itself into so-called safe mode before but the problem was more serious this time. The camera was installed on Hubble by astronauts in 2002 and has sent back spectacular images of the universe. Nasa has still not decided whether to spend money to service the space telescope. It needs new batteries and repairs to the gyroscopes that help it point itself the right way. Photo: Nasa.

New hunt for gravity waves

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com UK scientists have begun a search for the final piece in Einstein's jigsaw explaining how the universe works. They are looking for elusive ripples in the fabric of space and time caused by massive explosions deep in the universe. Experts from universities at Glasgow and Cardiff are working with colleagues in Germany to trace the incredibly weak signals, called gravitational waves. They were predicted by Einstein and are seen as a final test of his General Theory of Relativity. The scientists are using a giant detector called GEO600 in a field near Hanover, Germany. It works by shining laser beams down long tunnels in a bid to detect the tiny disturbances that gravitational waves would generate. The waves are believed to sweep out from colliding black holes or exploding stars like ripples in a pond. The scientists, who are working alongside a similar hunt in the US, hope they will even be able to detect the ripples from the Big Bang that created the universe nearly 14 billion years ago. Photo: GEO600.

Space clouds put on lightshow

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Night owls in the UK and Ireland have been dazzled this week by displays of bright space clouds. The glowing, herringbone bands spread across the northern night sky on Friday morning were the most spectacular seen for years. The BBC radio station Five Live was inundated by callers from across the country reporting the amazing fluorescent clouds. Alex Lloyd-Ribeiro, of Durham, who took the picture above right, told Spaceweather.com: "I stepped outside at 3am and saw a great display - the best I have ever spotted." Astronomer Pete Lawrence, of Selsey, West Sussex, said: "I wandered round to the front of my house to see the Moon and was greeted by a brilliant electric blue display, the brightest I've seen." The spectacle was a display of noctilucent clouds which form more than 50 miles up on the edge of space. They are the highest clouds to form in the atmosphere and are not fully understood. However, many believe they may be caused by rocket and aircraft exhuast and be a sign of the pollution that is causing climate change. Robin Scagell, of the UK's Society for Popular Astronomy, said: These amazing clouds are seen far more often now than in the past, and exactly why is still a mystery. They appear only at midsummer in the northern sky, and are hardly ever seen farther south than Britain. They are a special feature of our midsummer skies." If you live in northern latitudes, it will be worth keeping an eye on the sky in the coming nights to see if there are more.

Shuttle's insect astronauts

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com British astronaut Piers Sellers will have some extra passengers when he rockets into space next month - thousands of fruit flies. Piers, 51, and his six crewmates on the shuttle Discovery will deliver the insects to the international space station for research to help humans survive long space missions. Experts want to study the flies, like those pictured here, to help understand why changes develop in astronauts' immune systems when they spend time in orbit. Trays of fruit fly eggs will hatch out aboard the space station. But there is no danger of them infesting the place because they will be kept in special compartments. During the shuttle's 12-day mission, a second generation of flies will mature from eggs to adults. They will return to Earth fully developed and then be compared with insects hatched at Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California. Scientists believe that biological changes in weightlessness cause the human immune system to become supressed. At the same time, it appears that some bacteria become more virulent in the same conditions. A combination of the two events creates a worrying hazard for astronauts. Despite the obvious differences between humans and insects, the scientists believe the study will help them unlock vital secrets about the immune system that protects against disease. Principal investigator Sharmila Bhattacharya said: "Understanding the immune system using fruit flies will be similar to the process we used to understand and build complex machines. We start small and simple and progress to more complicated and advanced concepts, thus extending our understanding in the future to helping optimise human performance in space." Piers is due to make at least two space walks on the shuttle mission which is scheduled to blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida, on July 1.

Black hole riddle 'solved'

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Space scientists may have solved one of the universe's greatest riddles - why black holes shine so brightly. The answer is magnetism, the same force that causes a hiker's compass needle to swivel. Black holes are the cannibals of the cosmos, gobbling up anything unlucky enough to come too close. Not even light can escape anything sucked inside. Now Nasa has found that gravity is not enough to explain why material gets pulled in. The black hole's magnetic field plays a major role and also causes the doomed matter to flare like a distress beacon before it goes. Black holes power the brightest objects in the universe, quasars, and shine with up to a quarter of the radiation emitted by the universe since the Big Bang. Nasa used a space telescope called Chandra, observing with X-ray eyes, to study a black hole called J1655 in our own galactic back yard. The black hole is stripping gas from a close-by star and swallowing it up. Nasa's results show that gravity is not enough to pull the material in. Instead the data confirmed that magnetic turbulence helps drive gas into the black hole and also generates the light that shines outwards and turns them into celestial beacons. The discovery team, led by Jon Miller, of Michigan University, announce their findings in the journal Nature. Miller says: "By intergalactic standards J1655 is in our backyard, so we can use it as a scale model to understand how all black holes work, including the monsters found in quasars." The major discovery will help astronomers to understand how black holes grow. They will also try to learn how magnetic fields affect disks of material detected around young sun-like stars where planets are forming. The Earth has a magnetic field which helps cause spectacular auroras when it is buffeted by electrically charged particles from the Sun called the solar wind. The artist's impression shows gas being stripped from a star by a black hole together with an X-ray spectrum measured by Chandra.

We're forever blowing bubbles

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Gee fizz! Earth is surrounded by more bubbles than an Aero chocolate bar, space scientists have discovered. They were discovered by a fleet of European satellites that bump into them during their orbits. The four-spacecraft flotilla called Cluster have encountered thousands of bubbles of superheated gas as they pass over the sunlit, daytime side of the Earth. Their discovery, confirmed by a joint European satellite mission with China called Double Star, will help scientists understand how a stream of particles from the sun called the solar wind interacts with the Earth's magnetic field. The bubbles, found at a distance of 50,000 to 75,000 miles above the Earth, are known as density holes. They are regions of space where the density of gas suddenly becomes ten times lower but the temperature of the remaining gas leaps from 100,000 C to ten million C. Researcher George Parks, of the University of California, Berkeley, said he thought he was seeing instrumentation glitches when Cluster first flew through the bubbles. Then he saw that the data was recorded by all four craft in the flotilla and he realised the effect was real. Parks says that during every orbit, the spacecraft fly through 20 to 40 bubbles which expand to about 600 miles in size (1,000km) and probably last about ten seconds before they burst. The ESA artist's image shows the Earth’s magnetosphere (in blue) embedded in the flow of the solar wind coming from the left.

New hope for Jumbo telescope

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com A unique astronomical observatory aboard a Jumbo jet is a step closer to winning a reprieve from Nasa. The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is a Boeing 747 that is due to fly a German-built telescope. Nasa upset its partners at the German Aerospace Centre by failing to include the project in its budget request to Congress in February. The agency has so far spent £270 million ($500 million) on the project. It is close to completion, though over budget and behind schedule, and astronomers are appalled that it might be scrapped at such a late stage. Now a senior review board, NASA’s Program Management Council, has decided that there are "no insurmountable technical or programmatic challenges" to completing SOFIA. It notes, however, that Nasa has still made no firm decision whether to continue the project or cancel it. The telescope, with a 2.5 metre (8.2ft) mirror, is designed to fly into the stratosphere at a height of 41,000ft. That will place it above nearly all the water vapour in the atmosphere that blocks much infrared radiation from the stars. The telescope views the sky from a large door in the side of the fuselage near the jet's tail. The observatory has been tested on the ground but no flights have yet been made.

Meteor impact seen on Moon

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Nasa scientists have spotted a new crater being blasted out of the surface of the Moon. They videoed a bright flash as a space rock smashed into the region called Mare Nubium - the Sea of Clouds. The meteor from deep space exploded with the force of four tons of TNT and created a crater around 14 yards wide and three yards deep. But the stone that caused it was probably only around 10 inches across, experts estimate. A student, Nick Hollon, working with Nasa's Marshall Space Flight Centre at Huntsville, Alabama, spotted the flash while making a video of the Moon through a 10-inch telescope. Nasa want to find out more about lunar impacts to check the level of danger that astronauts will face when they return as part of President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration. Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office, estimates that more than a ton of meteoroids hits the Moon every day. But most of it is very small in the form of comet dust. He said the rock that created the new crater only reached the ground because of the lack of a lunar atmosphere. He said: "Earth's atmosphere protects us. A 10-inch meteoroid would disintegrate in mid-air, making a spectacular fireball in the sky but no crater." The impact, which you can view in the video here happened on May 2 but has only just been revealed. Cooke's team is monitoring the dark side of the Moon to check for any more meteor impacts.

Extra 'moon' departs the Earth

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Earth is saying goodbye this week to an extra moon that has been looping around us for seven years. It is an asteroid that got caught up in Earth's gravitational pull in 1999 and has been corkscrewing around us ever since, Nasa revealed yesterday. The 20 yard wide space rock, called 2003 YN107, is too small to be seen without a powerful telescope. But experts have been keeping a close eye on its celestial dance. Nasa expert Paul Chodas says that on Saturday the asteroid dipped slightly closer to Earth than usual. The close approach, at a distance of around two million miles, gave it the flip it needed to send it spiralling away into space again. But other asteroids are known that also become temporary extra moons - and YN107 will hook up with us once again in around 60 years time. Astronomers call the objects "coorbitals" because they share Earth's own orbit, going around the Sun in almost exactly one year. When one catches up with the Earth, or vice versa, the strange spiral dance begins and the asteroid slowly corkscrews around our planet. Chodas said: "These asteroids are not truly captured by Earth's gravity. But from our point of view, it looks like we have a new moon." Chodas of NASA's Near Earth Object Program at Pasadena, California, added: "We believe 2003 YN107 is one of a whole population of near-Earth asteroids that don't just fly by Earth. They pause and corkscrew in our vicinity for years before moving along." Astronomers already know of at least four asteroids that perform the trick. The biggest, 2004 GU9, is around 200 yards wide and has been corkscrewing around Earth for 500 years.

Gracious! A great ball of fire

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Scientists have discovered the biggest ball of fire ever spotted racing through the universe. The blazing gas is more than a billion times more massive than the Sun and three million light years wide - that is five billion times the size of our solar system. It is speeding at nearly 500 miles a second through a distant cluster of galaxies called Abell 3266 in the constellations of Horologium and Reticulum. The cosmic fireball was detected by an international team of astronomers using a European satellite called XMM-Newton that looks at the universe with X-ray eyes. It is many millions of light years away and so of no danger to the Earth. Dr Alexis Finoguenov, of the University of Maryland, said: "The size and velocity of this gas ball is truly fantastic. We believe this is a massive 'building block' being delivered to one of the largest assemblies of galaxies we know." The fireball glows with a comet-like tail in the satellite pictures, although it is nothing like a comet in any other respect. The Abell 3266 cluster contains hundreds of galaxies and large amounts of hot gas heated to nearly one billion degrees. The scientists say both the cluster gas and the giant gas ball are held together by the gravitational attraction of unseen dark matter. Dr Francesco Miniati, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, said: "What interests astronomers is not just the size of the gas ball but the role it plays in the formation and evolution of structure in the universe."

UK's Bridget to explore Mars

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Britain announced today that it will lead a new assault on Mars using a rover called Bridget. They hope to find martian life using the intelligent robot buggy nicknamed after screen legend Brigitte Bardot. The Government revealed major funding for a European mission called ExoMars will launch in 2011 and is expected to cost between 600 million and 800 million euros. Britain pledged £1.7 million pounds towards research and development for the follow-up to the ill-fated Beagle 2 which is believed to have crashed on the Red Planet on Christmas Day, 2003. Professor John Zarnecki told a news conference in London that there was no guarantee which UK contributions would be selected. But he added: "Are we confident? You bet we are!" Professor Zarnecki, of the Open University, added: "The UK is actively preparing to go to Mars. Today's announcement will allow us to play a major role in ExoMars." Space scientists at EADS Astrium, Stevenage, are already testing a prototype of Bridget, the size of a Smart car, which will crawl over rocks and tackle 30 degree slopes on Mars. Dr Mike Healy of EADS Astrium said: "She has a tighter turning circle than Peter Crouch." Yesterday the slow-crawling, six-wheeled buggy showed itself off in London's Carlton Terrace where the only obstacles were double yellow lines and traffic wardens. The mastermind behind the Beagle 2 mission, Professor Colin Pillinger, is not currently involved with ExoMars but Prof Zarnecki said: "We hope and expect that he will be." Dr Mark Sims, of the University of Leicester, who was actively involved with Beagle 2, said: "We would not be able to do this without having done Beagle." After launch on a Soyuz or Ariane rocket, ExoMars will take the long route to Mars with a two-year journey through the solar system. It is making its extended journey to avoid the planet's dust storm season. Missions to Mars usually get there in around six or seven months. While a telecoms satellite goes into orbit around the red planet, the rover will land using parachutes plus a new form of airbags that instantly deflate rather than bounce. Bridget will have camera eyes that can detect interesting rocks hundreds of metres away and zoom in on them. The buggy will drive to special features and can also drill up to two metres down to look for signs of life. She was recently tested on Mars-like terrain on Tenerife. Leicester scientists led by Dr Sims are developing a "pregnancy test" kit for the mission. Called the Life Marker Chip, it will look for molecules linked with extinct or existing life on Mars. The technology is expected to have uses beyond space such as aiding forensic analysis at crime scenes. Another experiment being built at Imperial College London is a microseismometer the size of a thumbnail that will detect any Marsquakes plus any water that may lie underground. Britain is the second biggest contributor, after Italy, to Europe's Aurora programme to explore the solar system, having pledged £75 million last year. The UK cash announced yesterday will be spent on planning nine aspects of the unmanned mission. 1, Bridget the rover; 2, the Life Marker Chip that will search for life; 3, a panoramic camera to map the planet in 3D; 4, an X-ray diffractometer to study the martian geology; 5, the miniature seismometer to search for Marsquakes and detect any underground water; 6, an atmospheric experiment package to study the planet's weather; 7, a spectrometer to look at radiation that reaches Mars' surface; 8, technology to land the spacecraft safely on the planet; and 9, designing the craft's parachute system. It is hoped the mission will help pave the way for eventual manned missions to the red planet. You may be wondering why the buggy is nicknamed Bridget. Engineering jargon calls prototypes like Bridget a "Breadboard". That get shortened to "BB" - just like Brigitte Bardot.

'Computer' is 2,000 years old

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com A clockwork mechanism found in a 2,000-year-old shipwreck is the earliest known computer, experts believe. The intricate bronze system of more than 30 wheels and dials was used by ancient Greeks to predict the movements of the planets. The device was found damaged in the wreck of a cargo ship off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. Now British and Greek scientists have discovered a hidden inscription using sophisticated X-ray techniques. Michael Wright, of London's Science Museum, says the computer was used to track the worlds known to the ancients - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The hand-operated device, on display at the Athens National Archaeological Museum, is thought to have been made on Rhodes. Its movements suggest that its creator was centuries ahead of Copernicus and Galileo by putting the Sun at the centre of the cosmos rather than the Earth.

Planets are 'made of diamonds'

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Planets with diamond mountains could exist in a young solar system being studied by Nasa scientists. The infant worlds are spinning in a vast cloud of carbon gas around Beta Pictoris, one of the closest stars to the Sun. Carbon, which is also a basic building block of life, was detected in the dusty disk 63 light-years away from Earth. Nasa discovered it using a satellite called Fuse which looks at the universe with ultraviolet eyes. They say the star's solar system might also resemble our own sun's family of worlds in its early days of formation. Atmospheres around any planets could be rich in methane like Saturn's biggest moon Titan. Beta Pictoris is 1.8 times more massive than the sun but very young at just eight to 20 million years old. Its dusty disk was first spotted 22 years ago. Observations with the Hubble space telescope have previously suggested that a planet the size of Jupiter is orbiting the star and rocky worlds like the Earth could also exist. Scientists believe that the carbon gas is released by comets or asteroids colliding with each other, a process similar to that which seeded our own planet with the ingredients for life. Aki Roberge, of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, said: "There is much, much more carbon gas than anyone expected. Could this be what our own solar system looked like when it was young? Are we seeing the formation of new types of worlds? Either prospect is fascinating."

Hoots mon! We have a problem

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Sir Richard Branson's space business wants to launch flights from Scotland, the company revealed this week. Virgin Galactic are in talks to take off from Machrihanish on the west coast and Lossiemouth on the east. Both are RAF airfields with long runways capable of launching Virgin's SpaceShipTwo passenger craft. The one problem they forsee is bad weather. Virgin is building its main spaceport in New Mexico. But it wants to take it to selected airports around the world for special flights. Virgin Galactic president Will Whitehorn told me: "To fly from the north of Scotland would be incredible. Passengers would have spectacular views of the Scottish coastline. "The only potential worry is the Scottish weather!" He said 100 wannabe space tourists had already signed up for the $200,000 trips aboard SpaceShipTwo. The ship will be carried high into the atmosphere suspended from the belly of a White Knight aircraft. There it will be dropped free and a powerful rocket will carry it 75 miles up to the edge of space. Each spacecraft will carry eight people including five or six paying tourists who will peer out from big round windows. Mr Whitehorn said: "People all want to see the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space. But above all they want to experience weightlessness." After their trip into space the ship would re-enter the atmosphere like a shuttlecock and glide to a landing. Mr Whitehorn said flights would not be possible from the southern UK because of heavy air traffic. But the company also wants to fly from Koruna in Sweden to take passengers inside the spectacular Northern Lights. He told the UK's first ever space tourism conference in London that Virgin would not get into a space race with other private companies. He said: "It is a safety race. We want to develop the safest technology ever used in space exploration." Test flights are due to begin next year. Mr Whitehorn said he expected the price of a ticket to drop to below $100,000 eventually.

Hiker spots ancient supernova

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com A holidaying astronomer has discovered a unique rock carving depicting a brilliant supernova that exploded in our Milky Way 1,000 years ago. The incredible picture, which was left by North American Indians, is believed to be the first record to be found in the New World of the star blowing itself to bits. It shows an eight-pointed star alongside an image of a scorpion. The rare stellar suicide, already known to have been observed from China, the Middle East and Europe, happened in 1006 in the constellation Lupus, close to Scorpius, the scorpion. The rock carving, pictured, was found by John Barentine, a professional scientist at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, while hiking in the White Tank Mountain Regional Park in Arizona. An ancient Native American tribe called the Hohokam are thought to have lived in the area, close to what is now Phoenix, Arizona. Barentine told a meeting of the American Astronomical Society at Calgary, Canada, that he recognised the star was probably the supernova straight away. He added: "The supernova of 1006 was perhaps the brightest such event visible from Earth for thousands of years, reaching the brightness of a quarter moon. "If confirmed, this discovery supports the idea that ancient Native Americans were aware of changes in the night sky and moved to commemorate them in their cultural record." He said it could also help archaeologists to date accurately other rock carvings, or petroglyphs, in the USA and the rest of the world.

Mars buggy clears sand trap

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com A Nasa buggy is free again on Mars after suffering every driver's nightmare - getting stuck in sand. Opportunity got bogged down in loose martian soil last month as it tried to cross between two dunes to head for Victoria Crater half a mile away. The rear two of the robot rover's six wheels spun in the soft sand as operators in California tried to free it. They finally got back onto solid ground it by edging the rover very slowly backwards over several days. Opportunity is exploring the Meridiani Planum near the Martian equator. Nasa has decided to name the sand trap Jammerbugt, meaning the Bay of Lamentation in Danish. Opportunity and sister rover Spirit will get a software upgrade this month over a distance of 242 million miles. They are still roaming the Red Planet more than two and a quarter years after they landed on missions designed to last just 90 days. Spirit is resting out winter with a broken wheel in Gusev Crater on the opposite side of Mars to Opportunity. The image is courtesy NASA/JPL.

Close galaxy in dusty detail

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Our closest giant galaxy, the Andromeda nebula, looks like a celestial plughole in a dramatic new picture from a Nasa space telescope. Spitzer's infrared camera captures one trillion stars embedded in a spiral of dust in the photo of the cosmic city. The orbiting observatory shows the myriad of stars as a blue glow against the red swirls that represent the galaxy's dust. Astronomer Dr Pauline Barmby of Cambridge, Massachusetts, said: "This is the first time the stellar population of Andromeda has been determined using the galaxy's infrared brightness." The galaxy, which dwarfs our own Milky Way of 200 bilion stars, is our next-door neighbour - but it still lies 2.5 million light-years away. It is so vast that a beam of light takes 260,000 years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. The galaxy, which lies in the constellation of Andromeda, can be seen without a telescope as a fuzzy patch on a clear dark night from the UK. It covers an area of the sky as big as seven full moons and 3,000 individual snaps from Spitzer had to be stitched together to create this one picture.

Pull in at orbiting pit stop

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Space scientists are set to compete to build the first gas stations in orbit. Nasa plan to offer a $5 million dollar prize for private enterprise to develop pit stops around the Earth and Moon. The orbiting garages could supply liquid hydrogen and oxygen to spacecraft on interplanetary missions. Fuel would be made from any water found in craters near the Moon's poles plus oxygen extracted from the lunar soil. Scientists say it will be much easier to lift fuel from the Moon than Earth because of its weaker gravity. But they need to overcome a number of problems to produce a fuel depot in space. For example, you could not use a dipstick to measure liquid levels in a zero gravity environment. Fuel tanks would also need special insulation to keep their contents cold (-253C for hydrogen and -183C for oxygen) in the glare of sunlight, New Scientist reports online. Nasa also need the gas stations to operate automatically with no human attendant to fill a spaceship's tank. The prize money will go to the first team to build, launch and test a working fuel station in low-Earth orbit by 2012. The tanks must hold at least 20kg of liquid hydrogen and 120kg of liquid oxygen for 120 days.

Galaxies galore are far out

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com UK astronomers have discovered the most distant cluster of galaxies ever seen by peering back in time nearly ten billion years. They found hundreds of the "star cities" gathered inside a cloud of gas heated to more than 10 million degrees, it was revealed today. The team, from universities across England plus Edinburgh, discovered the cluster using a European X-ray satellite called XMM Newton. They labelled it XMMXCS 2215-1738 then measured its distance with a giant telescope on Hawaii, the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting at Calgary, Canada, was told. But the scientists say they are baffled as to how such a huge cluster of galaxies, more than 500 trillion times as massive as the sun, formed so early in the life of the universe. Co-discoverer Professor Bob Nichol, from the University of Portsmouth, said yesterday: "The key question is, what's it doing there? This massive lump of matter is three-quarters the way back to the Big Bang." The astronomers are now using the Hubble space telescope to take detailed pictures of the galaxy cluster. The UK contributors included astronomers from universities in Sussex, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Oxford, Portsmouth and Nottingham. They were working with Adam Stanford, research scientist at the University of California. American scientists have used natural "cosmic telescopes" to look back even further in time, the meeting heard. They have spotted infant galaxies born in the first billion years after the Big Bang. The star cities' feeble light has taken an incredible 12 billion years to reach us. They were only seen because much closer clusters of galaxies acted like giant magnifying glasses on them. The phenomenon, called a gravitational lens, was predicted by Einstein and made the distant galaxies appear up to 100 times bigger and brighter. The discovery team, led by Professor Holland Ford of Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, found them by comparing photos taken with the Hubble space telescope with infrared images taken at mountaintop observatories. A third team, from California and Florida, has also found galaxies galore, the meeting learned. They used Nasa's Spitzer Space Telescope to discover nearly 300 clusters of galaxies. Nearly 100 of these are between eight and ten billion light-years away, so appear as they did when the universe was less than half its present age. The colour image, showing the faint red galaxies of the galaxy cluster XMMXCS 2215-1738 in the center, enveloped in the bluish haze representing the invisible X-ray emission from the extremely hot gas, is reprioduced courtesy the European Southern Observatory Imaging Survey; NOAO.

Asteroid spells rubble trouble

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com An asteroid that could one day hit the Earth is a flying heap of rubble, experts have discovered. The peanut-shaped space missile called Itokawa is like a flying gravel bank made up of loose-packed rocks, pebbles and dust. The rubble is held together by Itokawa's weak gravity, according to photos and other data from a space probe that has spent months shadowing the mysterious mini-world. Itokawa, which is 585 yards long (535m), is one of the group of Near Earth Asteroids, so-called because its orbit around the Sun crosses that of our own planet. Astronomers say it will collide with us within the next million years unless it is first destroyed or has its orbit changed. Japan's Hyabusa probe - the name means Falcon - pulled up alongside Itokawa in September last year and briefly perched on its surface in November to collect samples. Japan's space agency has had trouble controlling the probe but still hopes to bring the asteroid bits home, parachuting them into the Australian Outback by June 2010. Results from the daring space mission are revealed in the latest issue of the journal Science this week. The experts says the presence of large boulders in the rubble pile suggest that Itokawa was formed after a collision broke up a parent asteroid. The resulting fragments, including material from which the planets formed 4.5 billion years ago, fell together to produce the asteroid circling the Sun today. The journal says: "Understanding how they are built may not only someday help us deflect or destroy one on a collision course with Earth, but tell us how Earth was formed." The accompanying image is courtesy of the Japanese space agency JAXA.

Antarctic crater wiped out life

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Space scientists have discovered a crater the size of England from an asteroid impact that wiped out nearly all life. The hole was blasted out of the Earth by a cosmic missile 250 million years ago. It was spotted, half a mile under the ice in the Antarctic, by Nasa satellites. Experts say the killer asteroid was around 30 miles wide, five times the diameter of another that hit the Earth 65 million years ago, dooming the dinosaurs. The older crater lies in the Wilkes Land area of eastern Antarctica. Researchers believe the impact was so powerful that it triggered the break-up of a supercontinent called Gondwana, pushing Australia northwards. The catastrophic consequences also caused the greatest mass-extinction ever on Earth, wiping out virtually all life on land and in the sea. The crater's location was discovered by twin Nasa satellites called Grace which work together to map the gravitational pull of the Earth. They found a mass concentration of material at Wilkes Land typical of that produced by a meteor impact. Follow-up studies using aircraft radar detected a circular ridge 300 miles wide under the ice, the rim of the impact crater. Geology professor Ralph von Frese, of Ohio State University, who led the discovery team, said: "This impact is much bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs and probably would have caused catastrophic damage." Dinosaurs which later took over the world were wiped out after an asteroid six miles wide hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. Ohio State University's false-colour image, revealing the presence of the Antarctic crater is shown above.

Pioneer probes are off course

By PAUL SUTHERLAND, SpaceStories.com Nasa scientists are investigating a mysterious force that is luring their spacecraft off course. Two unmanned probes sent deep into the solar system more than 30 years ago are hundreds of thousands of miles from where they should be. Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 were launched in 1972 and 1973 to investigate the outer planets. Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, lost contact with Pioneer 10 in 2003 when it was 250,000 miles off course. Its sister ship is also heading in the wrong direction and scientists believe that two other probes - Galileo and Ulysses - were affected by a similar anomaly. Now Nasa researcher Slava Turyshev is analaysing years of data from the Pioneer probes in a bid to find out why, New Scientist reports. Some physicicists believe the space probes may have shown that we do not properly understand how gravity affects the movement of objects in space. Turyshev wants to discover whether there was an onboard problem, such a minuscule leak of gas propellant, or if an undiscovered cosmic force is at work. His team will spend a year poring over nearly 95,000 bits of data sent back to Earth from Pioneer 10, including every firing of the thrusters and every malfunction. They will analyse 29 years of information from the probe during which it travelled an incredible 7.5 billion miles on a course heading out of the solar system. Pioneer 10 is roughly headed for the bright red star Aldebaran in Taurus but will take more than a million years to reach it. The image is a Nasa artist's impression of Pioneer 10 in deep space.