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"Most massive galaxies, including our own Milky Way, are thought to harbour supermassive black holes at their centres. But these newly discovered black holes are much bigger than would be predicted by extrapolating from observations from their host galaxies. This suggests that the factors influencing the growth of the largest galaxies and their black holes differ from those influencing smaller galaxies. The findings come from observations of two nearby galaxies: NGC 3842 and NGC 4889."

"Harps employs an indirect method of detection that infers the existence of orbiting planets from the way their gravity makes a parent star appear to twitch in its motion across the sky. "Our new observations with Harps mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet," said team leader Xavier Bonfils from the Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France. "Because red dwarfs are so common - there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way - this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.""

HyperPhysics is an exploration environment for concepts in physics which employs concept maps and other linking strategies to facilitate smooth navigation. For the most part, it is laid out in small segments or "cards", true to its original development in HyperCard. The entire environment is interconnected with thousands of links, reminiscent of a neural network.

"ESA's Planck mission has delivered its first all-sky image. It not only provides new insight into the way stars and galaxies form but also tells us how the Universe itself came to life after the Big Bang."

"The stereo movie has been adapted to human binocular vision. The movie does not represent what you would actually see with your two eyes if you visited a real black hole. In reality, the curved spacetime would distort wavefronts of light away from spherical, confusing your binocular perception. The conflicting visual cues might make you feel queasy. But the failure of binocular vision is merely a limitation of beings who have evolved in flat spacetime. Trinocular vision would work fine."

"Astronomers have spied a star's swan song as it is shredded by a black hole. Researchers suspect that the star wandered too close to the black hole and got sucked in by the huge gravitational forces. The star's final moments sent a flash of radiation hurtling towards Earth. "