Europe's Herschel space telescope has spied a far-distant galaxy with the aid of a cosmic "zoom lens". The observatory is already one of the most powerful astronomical tools ever built, but its abilities can be boosted thanks to a neat trick of gravity. By viewing a huge cluster of galaxies, Herschel has been able to study in detail an even more distant object. This is possible because the gravity of the foreground cluster magnifies the light of the background galaxy. In a new picture released by the European Space Agency (Esa), this far-off galaxy is seen just a couple of billion years after the Big Bang. "If the cluster were not there, we might not be able to see the galaxy," commented Professor Seb Oliver from the University of Sussex, UK.

Commanding the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) camera aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, a group of 16 seventh-grade students from California looked for lava tubes on the surface of Mars. They found what they were looking for, but they also discovered a small black feature straddling one of the tubes. The feature near the Pavonis Mons volcano was a hole, punched in the top of a hollow tube. It's a cave on Mars, otherwise known as a "skylight." The students, from Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, California, were participating in the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), a part of Arizona State University's Mars Education Program. This program engages youngsters in real Mars research by getting them to ask questions about the Red Planet's geology....

A new robotic telescope designed to study planets around other stars has taken its first image. Although based in Chile, the Trappist telescope will be operated from a control room in Belgium, 12,000km away. As well as detecting and characterising so-called exoplanets, Trappist will also study comets orbiting our Sun. The 0.6m fully-automated telescope will be based at the La Silla Observatory, on the outskirts of Chile's Atacama Desert. "Terrestrial planets similar to our Earth are obvious targets for the search for life outside the Solar System," said Emmanuel Jehin, one of the astronomers on the project. "Comets are suspected to have played an important role in the appearance and development of life on our planet." The telescope's stunning first image shows...

In March, Discovery News had a look at a Mars rover concept that could revolutionize how we carry out planetary exploration. This rover has no wheels, it's inspired by a bizarre desert plant and its only means of propulsion is the Martian wind. And now, North Carolina State University (NCSU) scientists have designed a computer program to test different designs of the rover before it is even built. Enter the Mars Tumbleweed Rover, destined to roll where no robot has rolled before. The Mars landscape has so far been dominated by landers and wheeled rovers, and that probably won't change for some time to come. Sure, NASA's current Mars Exploration Rovers are (or "was" in the case of the hibernating Spirit) showing us amazing longevity, but is there another way to...

An object that hit Jupiter last year with a force equivalent to a few thousand nuclear bombs, which left it with a scar the size of Pacific Ocean was probably an asteroid, say astronomers. Images of the "bruise" captured by the Hubble telescope show the aftermath of an asteroid striking a planet. It could provide clues about what might happen if a similar object hit Earth. The spot was first seen in 2009 by an Australian amateur astronomer. The astronomer in question, Anthony Wesley, has recently taken another striking image of an bright fireball hitting the gas giant. Scientists believe it to be a meteoroid - a small particle of space debris. A team of scientists described in the Astrophysical Journal Letters how they compared the 2009 Hubble images with those of scars left on...

An unmanned Japanese spacecraft designed to return samples from an asteroid has completed an important step on its journey back to Earth. Hayabusa achieved the second and largest of four engine firings designed to guide the probe back home. The probe visited the asteroid Itokawa in 2005, making close approaches designed to capture soil samples. But the mission has been plagued by technical glitches affecting the engines and communications with Earth. It remains unclear whether the probe managed to grab any material from Itokawa; scientists will have to open the capsule to find out. At the weekend, the Japanese Space Agency (Jaxa) announced that Hayabusa had successfully completed its second Trajectory Correction Manoeuvre (TCM), guiding the spacecraft to Earth's "outer...

Imagine a space faring civilization hurtling between galaxies at speeds fast enough to travel from Earth to the moon in seven minutes! They are being propelled by the gravitational energy of a black hole. And, their "spaceship" has resources for supporting a population of several billion. This sounds like far out science fiction fantasy, but it's within the realm of plausibility. It turns out that the supermassive black hole in the center of our Milky Way galaxy hits a star "out of the ballpark" about every 100,000 years. Astronomers have clocked these runaway stars as having enough velocity to escape the galaxy. hough as yet there is no definitive evidence that traces their trajectories straight back to the central black hole, there is no other conceivable...

A supermassive black hole may have been observed in the process of being hurled from its parent galaxy at high speed. The finding comes from analysis of data collected by the US Chandra space X-ray observatory. However, there are alternative explanations for the observation. The work, by an international team of astronomers, has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Normally, each galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its centre. Given that these objects can have masses equivalent to one billion Suns, it takes a special set of conditions to cause this to happen. The authors believe this could be the result of the merger of two smaller black holes. But there are alternative explanations for the bright X-ray source; it could also be a Type...

Nasa's Solar Dynamics Observatory has provided an astonishing new vista on our turbulent star. The first public release of images from the satellite record huge explosions and great looping prominences of gas. The observatory's super-fine resolution is expected to help scientists get a better understanding of what drives solar activity. Launched in February on an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, SDO is expected to operate for at least five years. Researchers hope in this time to go a long way towards their eventual goal of being able to forecast the effects of the Sun's behaviour on Earth. Solar activity has a profound influence on our planet. Huge eruptions of charged particles and the emission of intense radiation can disrupt satellite...

There is something strange in the cosmic neighbourhood. An unknown object in the nearby galaxy M82 has started sending out radio waves, and the emission does not look like anything seen anywhere in the universe before. "We don't know what it is," says co-discoverer Tom Muxlow of Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics near Macclesfield, UK. The thing appeared in May last year, while Muxlow and his colleagues were monitoring an unrelated stellar explosion in M82 using the MERLIN network of radio telescopes in the UK. A bright spot of radio emission emerged over only a few days, quite rapidly in astronomical terms. Since then it has done very little except baffle astrophysicists. It certainly does not fit the pattern of radio emissions from supernovae: they usually get brighter...