Spitzer Finds Youngest Planet

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has peered through the dusty haze into the construction zones for new planets and found organic molecules. A team from the University of Rochester surveyed five very young stars in the constellation of Taurus and found these icy organic molecules around all of them. They also found a gap in the planetary disc around a million-year old star, which indicates that a young planet is already forming. This is much earlier than predicted by previous models of planet formation.

Astronomers Find a Huge Diamond in Space

Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found a diamond in space, and it’s big? really big. The object, technically known as BPM 37093, is a crystallized white dwarf star approximately 4,000 km across. The astronomers call it a diamond, because it’s made up of crystallized carbon surrounded by a thin layer of hydrogen and helium gasses. It’s believed that this is the final outcome for many stars, including our own Sun. In five billion years our Sun will become a white dwarf and two billion years after that the carbon should crystallize to form a gigantic diamond.

Survey Finds 1000 Variable Stars in Nearby Galaxy

Image credit: ESO An international survey by the European Southern Observatory has uncovered more than 1000 luminous red variable stars in nearby galaxy Centaurus A (aka NGC 5128). This is the first survey that’s ever been performed on a galaxy outside our own Milky Way. These stars, known as Mira-variables, pulse in a very specific …