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Even though they explode in an instant, the after effects of supernovae can be seen for hundreds of years. Astronomers have observed the remains of three supernovae that flashed in our skies hundreds of years ago. Careful image analysis found concentric arcs of light moving outwards from where the supernovae exploded. Light from these explosions has bounced off of clouds of interstellar gas, and is now visible to astronomers like an echo can be heard when sound bounces off a distant object.

One of the big problems with Earth-based observatories is our own atmosphere. It distorts the light from distant objects, always making them a little blurry. The giant W.M. Keck observatory in Hawaii uses a laser to create a bright virtual star in the sky so astronomers can calculate and remove these distortions to create amazingly clear views of the night sky. Its latest target is the centre of our own Milky Way which is thought to hide a supermassive black hole.

Like all spiral galaxies, our own Milky Way has magnificent spiral arms. We’re just inside the galaxy, so we don’t get a good view of them. An international team of radio astronomers have revised the distance to the Milky Way’s Perseus spiral arm. They used a simple method called triangulation, where the angles to various stars are measured when the Earth is at opposite sides of its orbit. The previous estimates are probably off because the stars are moving more quickly than astronomers realized, which added errors to the calculations.

An international team of astronomers have discovered a new large object in the Kuiper Belt; a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune. The object’s official designation is 2004 XR 190, but the discoverers are calling it “Buffy” for now. Buffy is approximately half the size of Pluto, and orbits the Sun roughly double the distance of Neptune. Although there are larger objects in the Kuiper Belt, Buffy has one of the most unusual orbits: 47-degrees off the plane of the ecliptic, where the other planets orbit.

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has found more than 100 new star clusters hidden within the dusty areas of our own Milky Way. The powerful infrared observatory can see through the dark dust that normally obscures our view of this region of the galaxy. The team of astronomers that made the discovery found that there are twice as many clusters in the southern galactic plane (visible from the southern skies) as there are from the northern galactic plane. This may offer hints about the location of the Milky Way’s spiral arms.