A supernova that exploded 41,000 years ago might have led to the extinction of mammoths, according to researchers at Berkeley Lab. They found ancient mammoth bones peppered with iron-rich grains that had been traveling at 10,000 km/second. These grains might have been emitted from a supernova that exploded about 250 light-years away from Earth. It's also possible that debris from the supernova coalesced into comet-like objects; one could have struck the earth about 13,000 years ago.

The latest images released from the Hubble Space Telescope pinpoint an enormous galaxy located almost 13 billion light-years away - at a time when the Universe was only 800 million years old. This galaxy contains 8 times the mass of stars as the Milky Way, and really shouldn't exist according to current astronomical theories. This research demonstrates that mature stars and large galaxies formed much earlier than astronomers had ever expected.

Paul Mayo captured this photograph of NGC 253 from his backyard observatory in Newcastle Australia. Paul used a Canon EOS 300D to take 7 separate images with his 0.3 metre telescope. You can see more of Paul's amazing photos at his website.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has arrived at Florida's Cape Canaveral to be prepared for launch. If all goes well, New Horizons will lift off atop an Atlas V rocket on January 11, 2006, and begin the decade-long journey to Pluto. It's equipped with seven scientific instruments, and will study Pluto and its moon Charon during a relatively brief flyby. The mission may even be extended, giving the spacecraft an opportunity to study additional objects in the region.

ESA engineers have figured out how to extend the life of SMART-1's ion engine, giving the mission more time to orbit the Moon. The mission was originally supposed to end in May 2006, but by conserving fuel and changing the way it engine operates, the engineers have pushed its demise back to July 2006. SMART-1 is completely out of fuel now, though, and will coast until its decaying orbit smashes it into the Moon.

Greetings, fellow SkyWatchers! Ah, yes. Dark skies are ours again and we'll begin the week with the magnificent M2. There will be plenty of galactic action as we study NGC 7331, hunt down Stephan's Quintet, and relax in the stellar swarm of M34. For early risers, the sky offers some splendid scenery as two planets join two visible open clusters. But dark skies always mean just a little more, don't they? Then think Caldwell 44 and 43 as you open your eyes to the skies, because...

Because here's what's up!

Shahriar Davoodian took this cool picture of the Dumbell Nebula (M27) from Damavand, Iran. He used a Canon EOS 300D attached to a Meade LX90 8" Telescope with a 4 minute exposure.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

That which was old is new again. The Moon, once thought a 'fait accompli', is now firmly back in the centre of many people's targets. We have to thank George W. Bush in giving his recent directive to NASA. This, together with NASA's announcement on how they plan to return to the moon, seems to indicate a golden lunar age has returned. You'd think smiles would be positively radiant at the recent seventh meeting of the International Lunar Exploration and Utilization Working Group, held from September 18-23 in Toronto, Ontario. Yes, many smiles enlivened the group. However, these smiles weren't like that of the child holding a cookie but like those of wise parents checking the list of ingredients. For this cookie has come before but disappeared all too quickly.

Instead of waiting for asteroids to slam into the Earth, the European Space Agency is working on a mission that will reach out and try to shift a space rock's orbit. The mission is called Don Quijote, and it will consist of two spacecraft: an orbiter and an impactor; similar to NASA's Deep Impact. The Sancho orbiter will rendezvous with a target asteroid and carefully calculate its orbit before and after the Hidalgo impactor slams into it. The ESA has chosen two candidate asteroids as potential targets, and will make a final decision in 2007.

A Boeing Delta II rocket successfully launched the first of a new class of modernized Block IIR global positioning system satellites early Monday morning. The rocked lifted off from Space Launch Complex 17A at 0337 GMT (11:37 pm EDT Sunday) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. This new class of GPS satellites will broadcast additional signals to improve civilian and military accuracy, and prevent any jamming attempts.

Researchers answer their true calling by flinging themself headlong into discovering and perhaps add a little more to humanity's collective knowledge. Their friends, sleep and even food get deleted to a secondary role as just one more lead, one more calculation or one more experiment could endow understanding. The cost for a researcher in answering this call might be years of personal neglect, even though society benefits greatly. Marcelo Gleiser in his book The Dancing Universe takes us through the history of physics from the gods of yesteryear to the cosmologists of today. He focuses on some of the really productive researchers and, in so doing, gives us a clearer understanding of physics, people and our society.

Joe Cahak captured this beautiful photograph of light from the setting Sun glinting off the launch trail left by yesterday's Minotaur rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Do you have photos you'd like to share? Post them to the Universe Today astrophotography forum or email them to me directly, and I might feature one in Universe Today.

The European Space Agency's Envisat satellite took this photo of Hurricane Rita on September 22, 2005 as it was passing Southern Florida. Envisat can use its radar instruments to peer through a hurricane's clouds and measure the roughness of the ocean beneath it. This is how scientists can estimate the wind speed of the storm at various points. Rita is expected to slam into Texas or Louisiana early Saturday morning.

By looking at the most distant Universe, astronomers are hoping to learn what kinds of galaxies formed first, leading through mergers to the mature galaxies we see today. The more galaxies you look at, the better the predictions. A team of French and Italian astronomers have used the VIsible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) instrument on one of the ESO's 8.2 m telescopes to image and measure thousands of galaxies. They found 2 to 6 times as many early galaxies with vigorous star formation than astronomers had previously expected.

In 1572, Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe observed and studied an exploding star that would later be named after him. NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows that the Tycho's Supernova remnant is an expanding bubble of debris which is inside a larger bubble of high-energy electrons. Astronomers think that remnants like this could be a source of cosmic rays; high-energy nuclei found throughout the galaxy which constantly bombard the Earth.

To have the current elements in the Universe, cosmologists believe there had to be several generations of stars, building up heavier and heavier elements. But what did that first generation of stars look like? They were probably huge, weighing 50-500 times the mass of the Sun. They lived quickly and then died as massive supernovae that seeded the surrounding space with heavier elements forged during this explosion. They could even be the source of gamma ray bursts, which are the most powerful known explosions in the Universe.

The European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft will have its mission extended by one Martian year - approximately 23 months - beginning December 2005. Since it began science operations in early 2004, Mars Express has made several findings: volcanic and glacial processes happened quite recently; there are small quantities of methane gas in the Martian atmosphere, which could indicate life; and large bodies of liquid water might have lasted under the surface of Mars for a long period of time.

Cassini recently took this beautiful photograph of Saturn's rings, sweeping across the sky. Its tiny moon Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) is barely visible inside the Encke gap, in the middle of the photograph. The Cassini Division is the darker area at the upper left-hand portion of the picture.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For a desolation to be beautiful, there must be something special. Just after Dr. Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon, Neil Armstrong asked him what were his thoughts. He replied, "it's a magnificent desolation". Nearly forty years later, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Cowen combine the wizardry of IMAX with the magic of top flight professional entertainers to the film Magnificent Desolation. The result puts the viewer on the surface of the moon and lets them experience its strange but magnificent beauty all for themselves.

NASA has announced its fifth Centennial Challenges prize competition: the Regolith Excavation Challenge. Teams will compete head to head in 2006 or 2007 to see whose digging machine can excavate the most lunar soil, or regolith, in 30 minutes and deliver it to a collector. Any future moon base will require large quantities of regolith to be moved around by robotic diggers, so NASA is hoping to see innovative ideas now to base future technologies around.