For 50 years, humans have scanned the skies with radio telescopes for distant electronic signals indicating the existence of intelligent alien life. The search – centered at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

With a resolution of around 60 metres per pixel, the images provide a fascinating view of Lutetia. "This is a completely new world, which no-one has ever seen before," says Max Planck researcher Holger Sierks, Head of the OSIRIS team. The planetoid, whose longest axis measures around 126 kilometres, is oval in shape.

For decades, X-ray astronomers have studied the complex behavior of binary systems pairing a normal star with a black hole. In these systems, gas from the normal star streams toward the black hole and forms a disk around it. Friction within the disk heats the gas to millions of degrees -- hot enough to produce X-rays.

Astronomers studying the Milky Way have discovered a large number of previously-unknown regions where massive stars are being formed. Their discovery provides important new information about the structure of our home Galaxy and promises to yield new clues about the chemical composition of the Galaxy.

It was Aristarchus of Samos (310BC -230 BC), who ironically lived after Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), who was the first person in recorded history to come up with the idea of a heliocentric system, centuries before the Polish canon, physician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) wrote and posthumously published his seminal treatise, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). Aristarchus' idea of a heliocentric model of the cosmos, unfortunately, just didn't take with the ancient Greeks.

COLLEGE STATION, May 11, 2010 — Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a Texas A&M University-led team of astronomers has uncovered what may be the earliest, most distant cluster of galaxies ever detected.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Astronomers this summer will take a close look at a rare cosmic cradle for the universe's largest stars, baby bruisers that grow up to have 50 times the sun's mass.

The first scientific results from ESA's Herschel infrared space observatory are revealing previously hidden details of star formation. New images show thousands of distant galaxies furiously building stars and beautiful star-forming clouds draped across the Milky Way.