The most serious space weather event in history happened in 1859. It is known as the Carrington event, after the British amateur astronomer Richard Carrington, who was the first to note its cause: "two patches of intensely bright and white light" emanating from a large group of sunspots. The Carrington event comprised eight days of severe space weather.

The Galaxy Zoo files contain almost a quarter of a million galaxies which have been imaged with a camera attached to a robotic telescope (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, no less). In order to understand how these galaxies - and our own - formed, we need your help to classify them according to their shapes - a task at which your brain is better than even the fastest computer.

list of winning essays for the Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology Institute

The Sustainability Solution states: the absence of ETI observation can be explained by the possibility that exponential or other faster-growth is not a sustainable development pattern for intelligent civilizations.

On the International Dark Sky Association starting to lobby Washington D.C.

Will 2009 be the year the federal government finally takes light pollution seriously?

Astro2010, the current astronomy and astrophysics decadal survey, is the latest in a series of surveys that are produced every 10 years by the National Research Council (NRC) of The National Academy of Sciences.

"At the heart of the problem is the fascinating question: why are all the planets different? The ones in our solar system ought to have formed out of the same stuff at more or less the same time and yet no two are alike. And now the extrasolar planets seem to be demonstrating a similar variety."

a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication

We review properties of theories for the variation of the gravitation and fine structure 'constants'. We highlight some general features of the cosmological models that exist in these theories with reference to recent quasar data that are consistent with time-variation in the fine structure 'constant' since a redshift of 3.5. The behaviour of a simple class of varying-alpha cosmologies is outlined in the light of all the observational constraints.

Useful category breakout for astrophysics papers at Arxiv.

And though we may be away from those holographic representations, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey will soon be entering its third phase, in an attempt to create the biggest 3D map of the universe created so far.

Measurements of temperature fluctuations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) indicate that the fluctuation amplitude in one half of the sky differs from the amplitude in the other half. We show that such an asymmetry cannot be generated during single-field slow-roll inflation without violating constraints to the homogeneity of the Universe. In contrast, a multi-field inflationary theory, the curvaton model, can produce this power asymmetry without violating the homogeneity constraint. The mechanism requires the introduction of a large-amplitude superhorizon perturbation to the curvaton field, possibly a pre-inflationary remnant or a superhorizon curvaton-web structure. The model makes several predictions, including non-Gaussianity and modifications to the inflationary consistency relation, that will be tested with forthcoming CMB experiments.

Now, new images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are shedding light on the true structure of the Milky Way, revealing that it has just two major arms of stars instead of the four it was previously thought to possess.