December 30, 2010 Building a New Planet Science Update
Astronomers over the past decade have made remarkable progress in the study of extrasolar planets; over 500 distant worlds are now confirmed.

December 22, 2010 Taiwan-US astronomers shed light on 'dusty galaxies' News Release: Taiwan Today "Recent findings by a Taiwan-U.S. observation team studying distant 'dusty galaxies' could lead to a revision of astronomers' understanding of these ancient stellar phenomena."

November 17, 2010 Dissolving star systems creates a mess in Orion News Release: www.phys.org "For young stars, stellar outflows are the rule. T Tauri stars and other young stars eject matter in generally collimated jets. However, a region in Orion's giant molecular cloud known as the Becklin-Neugebauer/Kleinmann-Low (BN/KL) region, appears to have a clumpy, scattered set of outflows with "finger-like" projections in numerous directions. A new study, led by Luis Zapata at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, explores this odd region."

November 11, 2010 Lensed Galaxies Science Update
Just as a glass lens can deform the appearance of objects seen through it, so can the mass of the intervening galaxy can act as a "gravitational lens," distorting the image we would otherwise see into a more complex shape.

September 9, 2010 Making Massive Stars Science Update Massive stars -- those with more than about eight times the mass of the sun -- are arguably the most important actors in the universe.

July 22, 2010 Submillimeter Galaxies Science Update Astronomers using new submillimeter wavelength telescopes discovered, about dozen years ago, the existence of a new class of very distant galaxies.

June 23, 2010 Volcanic Moon of Jupiter Is Smelly and Bizarre News Release: www.space.com
article by Clara Moskowitz "Jupiter's moon Io is one of the strangest places in our solar system, with extremely tall mountains, foul-smelling gases in its tenuous atmosphere and incredible levels of volcanic activity beneath its surface."

June 17, 2010 Astronomers Witness a Star Being Born News Release: Yale University "The study's authors -- who include astronomers from Yale University, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany -- found the object using the Submillimeter Array in Hawaii and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Known as L1448-IRS2E, it's located in the Perseus star-forming region, about 800 light years away within our Milky Way galaxy."

June 10, 2010 The Atmosphere of Io Science Update Io is one of the four moons of Jupiter that Galileo discovered after he turned his new telescope heavenward.

June 4, 2010 Bok Globules Science Update Bok globules are small interstellar clouds of very cold gas and dust that are so thick they are nearly totally opaque to visible light, although they can be studied with infrared and radio techniques.

May 20, 2010 The Far Infrared Galaxy Science Update Our Milky Way galaxy, like other spiral galaxies, has copious amounts of dust in its spiral arms.

May 13, 2010 Seeing the Invisible Science Update Astronomers, like physicians, use as much of the electromagnetic spectrum as they can, from X-ray to radio wavelengths, to examine their subjects the with the most suitable diagnostics.

April 15, 2010 The Most Luminous Stellar Nurseries in the Universe Science Update Although many of the details about star formation are vigorously debated, the general principles are reasonably well understood.

April 1, 2010 Intense Star Formation in the Early Universe Science Update Distant galaxies are not only far away in space. Because it takes time for their light to reach us, they are also very far away in time -- snapshots from the distant past.

March 19, 2010 Astronomers Get Sharpest View Ever of Star Factories in Distant Universe News Release Astronomers have combined a natural gravitational lens and a sophisticated telescope array to get the sharpest view ever of "star factories" in a galaxy over 10 billion light-years from Earth. They found that the distant galaxy, known as SMM J2135-0102, is making new stars 250 times faster than our Galaxy, the Milky Way.

March 11, 2010 Martian Weather Science Update The Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) is a NASA mission that arrived at Mars in September, 1997, and for nine years circled the planet every two hours in a polar orbit (that is, traveling from the north pole to the south pole and back) at an altitude of 400 kilometers (249 miles) above the Martian surface.

March 4, 2010 Simulating the Birth of Massive Stars Science Update Astronomers have made great strides recently in understanding how modest stars -- those like the sun or smaller -- are formed.