Astronomers think they've found evidence that an asteroid broke up about 8.2 million years ago, scattering dust around the Solar System. The discovery was made by US and Czech Republic researchers who found a layer of helium 3 in oceanic sediment - this isotope is normally quite rare. This evidence matches computer simulations on a group of asteroid fragments in the asteroid belt that were once part of a larger object called Veritas. It was likely the biggest asteroid break up or collision in the last 100 million years.

This image, taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, shows Juventae Chasma, in the Lunae Planum region of Mars. The feature is located north of Valles Marineris, and its floor is covered with dunes. In the north-east region of the valley is a mountain composed of bright, layered material which scientists think contains mostly sulphate deposits.

After surveying 22 nearby star systems, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered two bright debris disks that resemble our own Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy rocks outside the orbit of Neptune. These disks encircle the kinds of stars that probably have habitable zones and planets, and fall into two types: wide and narrow belts. Both disks are about 60 light years away from Earth, and look remarkably similar to our early solar system.

A fleet of NASA and ESA spacecraft have spotted an immense jet of electrically charged particles in the solar wind between the Earth and the Sun. The jet is at least 200 times as wide as the Earth and occurs because magnetic field lines clash together in a process called "magnetic reconnection". These jets are similar to ones which form in the Earth's magnetic field, but at a much larger scale.

Just a few years ago, Pluto was considered unusual for Kuiper Belt Objects because it has a moon. Now three of the four largest KBOs have been discovered with moons, and it's causing astronomers to reconsider how this came about. Only 11% of smaller KBOs have a moon, and probably captured them with gravity. But the moons for the larger objects likely formed when similarly-sized planetoids collided together, and the debris turned into their moons.

The composition of many planets, asteroids and meteorites could be explained by the theory of "hit-and-run" collisions. Scientists originally believed that the four terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) were formed slowly over time as material built up by accretion. But it's entirely possible that objects sideswiped each other, and continued on; although, with both parties pretty banged up. Large objects don't even have to touch to do massive damage to each other through their gravitational influence.

Arizona astronomers have found a collection of stars that really shouldn't exist. They're located in the debris of NGC 2782, which is the result of a merger between a Milky Way-sized galaxy and a smaller galaxy. These kinds of mergers are very common in the Universe; however, they usually leave behind debris that doesn't contain the right ingredients to form stars - neutral hydrogen gas and molecular gas. But NGC 2782 has regions with stars that formed after the collision.

NASA's Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth early Sunday morning, bringing with it particles from a comet. Two members of Stardust's Navigation Team discuss the challenges of bringing this spacecraft back home.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! The busiest place to be as the week begins is the "Beehive" and the peak of the Delta Cancrid meteor shower, but if you're clouded out, dont worry - the Coma Berenicids will be along mid week. Come along as we explore Messier objects and one of the finest carbon stars around - R Leporis. So grab those binoculars or telescopes and head out into the night because...

Here's what's up!

Just over a year ago, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe touched down on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon. The mission was an outstanding success, and revealed amazing images of a world both alien and familiar. During its nearly 3-hour descent, the probe measured powerful winds and sampled an atmosphere that contains a complex organic chemistry - possibly the same molecules present when our Earth was very young.

Astronomers think they might have found a "dark galaxy", that has no stars and emits no light. Although the galaxy itself, located 50 million light years from Earth, is practically invisible, it contains a small amount of neutral hydrogen which emits radio waves. If astronomers are correct, this galaxy contains ten billion times the mass of Sun, but only 1% of this is hydrogen - the rest is dark matter.

The supermassive black holes at the heart of most galaxies put out so much energy they churn the interstellar dust that surrounds them. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory recently took a series of images of 56 elliptical galaxies, and revealed that the hot gas and dust blasting out X-rays have a different distribution from the stars we can see. This gas and dust should have settled down millions of years ago, but it appears that these black holes are feeding so voraciously that they're continuously stirring up the material.

Astronomers from UC Berkeley University have recently discovered a spiraling magnetic field in space, wrapped around a long, thin cloud of gas and dust called the Orion Molecular Cloud. The coiled magnetic field has pulled this gas cloud into a thin filament. Astronomers have suspected that magnetic forces can define the shape of interstellar clouds, but they haven't seen evidence for it, until now. The Orion Molecular Cloud contains two stellar nurseries; one in the belt region, and another in the sword region of the Orion constellation.

The Orion Nebula is one of the most magnificent objects in the night sky, but it won't last forever. Fortunately, astronomers now think they know where its successor will show up. A glowing gas cloud in the constellation Cassiopeia called W3 has just begun to shine with newborn stars. In just 100,000 years, it should be blazing in the night sky; just as the Orion Nebula fades from view. W3 was recently found to have a collection of massive protostars packed tightly together, eating away at a surrounding cocoon of gas and dust that obscures them from view.

An international team of astronomers have turned up an enormous companion galaxy to our Milky Way - it was hiding in plain sight. The star cluster is only 30,000 light years from Earth, and contains thousands of stars spread over an area 5,000 times larger than the full Moon in the sky. These stars don't fall within the Milky Way's spiral arms, galactic bulge or spherical halo, so astronomers figured they must belong to some other object. It's probably the remnant from an ancient galactic merger.

A new instrument called Exoplanet Tracker has turned up an extrasolar planet orbiting a star 100 light years away. This instrument is designed to detect subtle shifts in starlight as a star moves back and forth through interactions with its planet. The Exoplanet Tracker is much cheaper than traditional spectrographs, costing only $200,000, and capable of being installed on lower power telescopes. Although this version can only watch one star at a time, future improvements should allow it to monitor 100 stars simultaneously.

This outstanding photograph of the Orion Nebula was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The space-based observatory built up the photograph over the course of 105 orbits around the Earth. The full sized image contains a billion pixels, and astronomers were able to discover 3,000 stars of various stars. Hubble also spotted a collection of possible brown dwarfs, which aren't large enough to sustain fusion reactions in their cores.

According to new observations from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Vega appears to have a huge difference in temperature between its equator and poles. Vega is the 5th brightest star in the sky, completing one rotation every 12.5 hours. Its high rotation speed flattens out the star, so that it's equator is 23% wider than its polar diameter. This result confirms the theory that rapidly rotating stars are cooler at their equators.

A new computer simulation developed at the Carnegie Institution suggests that planets can form and survive around binary star systems. Astronomers previously believed that the complex gravity would make gas and dust too unstable to form planets, but this simulation indicates that this gravity might actually accelerate the process, causing large clumps to form in a matter of only 1,000 years. Since 2 out of 3 stars are members of multiple star systems, this raises the number of planets that might be in the Universe.

Salmon have an heriditary instinct to swim upriver against the stream. The same inate drive pushes some scientists to replace theories of the day with their own perceptions. These avant garde specialists are unafraid to tackle mainstream ideas in the belief that their views are correct. Jane Gregory's book, Fred Hoyle's Universe shows how Fred Hoyle fits this description of an original thinker in his near ceaseless, lifetime espousement of fresh ideas. The current of conformity never seemed to be too daunting as he went about following his own pursuits.