AstroCamp is organized annually by the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP).

The official opening of the program coordinated by the Porto Planetarium – Centro Ciência Viva starts at 21:00, in the Botanical Garden of Porto.

The 4th edition of the AstroCamp, the only astronomical summer camp in Portugal, will take place between 9 and 23 of August, 2015, in the Corno do Bico Protected Landscape.

Organized by Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP), the ASTRO•HOMUS exhibition will première in the Planetarium of Porto on the 22nd of November.

The Instituto de Astrofísica e Ciências do Espaço (IA) is the result of the merger between Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP) and Centro de Astronomia e Astrofísica da Universidade de Lisboa (CAAUL).

Researchers from the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto are a part of the largest study to use 3D Spectroscopy with Integral Field Units.

Organized by Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, the international conference Towards Other Earths II: The Star-Planet Connection will gather around two hundred researchers in Rivoli theater.

With the three most powerful telescopes in the world (VLT, Keck and Subaru) the team, which includes Carlos Martins (IA/CAUP), tried to measure variations in the fine structure constant.

The team, of which IA/CAUP researchers Nuno Cardoso Santos and Pedro Figueira are part of, estimates that Kepler-91b is the closest exoplanet ever detected to a giant star.

After more than 15 years of almost uninterrupted work, the Planetarium of Porto closes for upgrade on the 1^st of July.

CAUP completed a quarter of a century on the 4^th of May.

CAUP invites high school students to get acquainted with the B.Sc. in Astronomy, from the Faculty of Science of the University of Porto.

The mission, selected today by the European Space Agency (ESA) has the participation of CAUP and CAAUL.

At the end of its 1st year of activity, the SPACEINN project (EC/FP7) already had significant impact on several topics of stellar and solar physics, with the use of helio- and asteroseismology techniques.

A European team, including Alexandre Santerne (CAUP), detected the exoplanet Kepler-88 c thanks to the gravitational perturbation it caused on its transiting brother planet, Kepler-88 b.

José Pedro Vieira received a stimulus to investigation grant, from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The spectropolarimeter SPIRou will seek new habitable worlds, and has the participation of Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto.

The detection of Kepler-78b, published in the last edition of Nature, had the collaboration of Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto.

Between 14th and 18th of October, the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto hosts two important scientific meetings.

Na international team of astronomers, led by researchers from Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, was able to explain why some elliptical galaxies seem to have, simultaneously, high and low activity.

A bibliometric study, ordered by the portuguese National Science Foundation, ranks Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto first in terms of the number of citations per publication.

The second edition of Dark Sky Party Alqueva will take place in Monsaraz (Portugal), on the 12th and 13th of July, with support from CAUP.

The construction of one of the world's most advanced spectrographs will begin, after the approval by the European Southern Observatory of the project with portuguese collaboration.

Created in 1989, the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto has played an essential role in portuguese Astronomy.

An international team of astronomers, including CAUP researcher Alexandre Santerne, characterized two new exoplanets, thanks to combined observations from the Kepler space telescope, plus SOPHIE and HARPS-N spectrographs.

Registration has opened for the second edition of Astrocamp, the only astronomy summer camp in Portugal.

The Astronomy Day will present to students and their parents the current status of Astronomy in Portugal.

The University of Porto got 4 of the 13 Advanced Grants from the national science foundation (FCT).

Cláudio Gomes has been distinguished by the stimulus to investigation program, from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

An international team, which includes two astronomers from Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP) observed 100 local galaxies with an unprecedented resolution.

A European team, led by Xavier Dumusque (Observatoire de Genève & CAUP) detected a planet with about the mass of the Earth orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system — the nearest to the Sun.

A european team, with the participation of CAUP astronomer Nuno C. Santos, suggests that up to 35% of the giant planet candidates detected by the Kepler satellite might actually be stars or sub-stellar objects.

Tomorrow is a "Blue Moon" day, but our natural satellite won't actually turn blue.

An international team, led by EXOEarths researchers (Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto), proposes that metals like Magnesium might have an important role in the formation of low mass planets.

The Dark Sky Reserve Alqueva was the stage chosen by CAUP for two night sky observations, on the 20^th and 21^st July 2012.

Professors Michel Mayor, Joe Silk and Thierry Montmerle will analyze the scientific performance of Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP).

The Euclid mission (ESA), approved for construction, has the participation of portuguese astronomers, coordinated by Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto e Centro de Astronomia e Astrofísica da Universidade de Lisboa.

Sta. Cruz do Douro (Portugal) will be the stage for a meeting of experts in the fields of exoplanets and cosmology, to discuss the future of the ESPRESSO spectrograph.

Tonight, 5 to 6 of June of 2012, while we sleep in Portugal, millions of people on the other side of the world will observe the last Venus transit of our lives.

From 5 to 19 August 2012, some high school students will have the opportunity to attend AstroCamp, the first astronomy summer camp in Portugal.

A recent study indicates that type Ia Supernova have two different origins.

In the night of 5^th to 6^th of May, the Moon will be bigger and brighter than usual – a Super Moon.

An international team, composed by researchers from CAUP and the Observatoire de Genève, analized data both from the HARPS spectrograph and the Kepler satellite, showing that the orbits from other planetary systems are aligned, just like in our Solar System.

CAUP researcher Nuno Santos is a member of the team that discovered that super Earths orbiting red dwarfs, the type of stars which account for 80% of our galaxy, might be very frequent.

After the equinox, the countdown to Easter begins.

March 2012 is a good month to observe planets.

New discoveries from the Planck mission were announced, in an international conference held in Bologna (Italy).

Researcher from the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto observed the dwarf galaxy I Zw 18, and found that much of what is known about galaxy formation and evolution might need substantial revision.

Astronomers from Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto observe a large cluster of star formation.

Two separate teams of astronomers have detected, with data from the Kepler mission, two star systems with earth sized exoplanets.

A team of researchers, mainly from CAUP, has detected a rare type of active galactic nuclei (AGNs), which have simultaneously characteristics of young and old AGNs.

NASA's Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, Calif. has captured new radar images of Asteroid 2005 YU55 passing close to Earth.

In this excellent documentary, the BBC shows some of modern astronomy’s “tools of the trade”.

Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have found a star with spiral arms.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system.

NASA's Fermi team recently released the second catalog of gamma-ray sources detected by their satellite's Large Area Telescope (LAT). Of the 1873 sources found, nearly 600 are complete mysteries. No one knows what they are.

ESA’s Venus Express spacecraft has discovered an ozone layer high in the atmosphere of Venus.

The 2011 Nobel prize for Physics was attributed to a trio of American astronomers, for the discovery that the expansion of the Universe in accelerating.

On October 8th Earth is going to plow through a stream of dust from Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, and the result could be an outburst of Draconid meteors.

Humanity's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA), has officially opened for astronomers.

One hundred and fifty two years ago, a man in England named Richard Carrington discovered solar flares...

Herschel’s observations overturned theories of how galaxies formed their stars.

CAUP researchers participated in the discovery, published today on Nature, that the star HD 187547 oscillates with two tones.

CAUP researcher was a part of this discovery, which includes a super-Earth in the habitable zone.

Imagine forecasting a hurricane in Miami weeks before the storm was even a swirl of clouds off the coast of Africa - or predicting a tornado in Kansas from the flutter of a butterfly's wing1 in Texas. These are the kind of forecasts meteorologists can only dream about. Could the dream come true? A new study by Stanford researchers suggests that such forecasts may one day be possible - not on Earth, but on the sun.

NASA found several meteorites on which some molecules essential to life had formed.

For the first time, a spacecraft far from Earth has turned and watched a solar storm engulf our planet.

Scientists using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have discovered six “Y dwarfs” - star-like bodies with temperatures as cool as the human body.

Na international team of astronomers, which include CAUP researcher Nanda Kumar, used the VISTA survey telescope (ESO) to uncover 96 new star clusters in the Milky Way.

Observations conducted with Herschel satellite detected molecular Oxygen in Orion nebula.

NASA's Juno probe, scheduled to launch on August 5th, could change all that. The goal of the mission is to answer the question, What lies inside Jupiter?

After more than a week of quiet, solar activity is picking up with the emergence of two large sunspot groups on the sun's northeastern limb.

Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.

ESA’s Herschel space observatory has shown that water expelled from the moon Enceladus forms a giant torus of water vapour around Saturn. The discovery solves a 14-year mystery by identifying the source of the water in Saturn’s upper atmosphere.

Wrapping up 30 years of unmatched achievements and blazing a trail for the next era of U.S. human spaceflight, NASA's storied Space Shuttle Program came to a "wheels stop" on Thursday at the conclusion of its 135th mission.

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope discovered a fourth moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto. The tiny, new satellite - temporarily designated P4 - was uncovered in a Hubble survey searching for rings around the dwarf planet.

This is the first image obtained by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft after sucessfully entering orbit aroud Vesta.

On July 20, Michael Werner, Project Scientist for the Spitzer Space, will give a very special seminar at CAUP.

The first lunar eclipse of 2011 is also a total eclipse. In Portugal the Moon rises already fully eclipsed.

Since its explosion, in 1987, the brightness of this supernova has been decreasing. Now a multinational team has detected an increase in SN1987A’s brightness.

Approaching the 2013 solar maximum, the Sun’s activity is increasing.

NASA announced today the conclusion of attempts to re-establish contact with Mars Rover Spirit, after 14 months without any life signs.

Look out any east-facing window about a half hour before sunrise, and you’ll see a beautiful planet alignment.

CAUP celebrates 22 years of existence, at the top of the national research in Astronomy, with 527 published articles, and 1.75 times the world average of citations per article.

Researchers from Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP) took part in this discovery, published in the last issue of Science.

On March 29, 1807, German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers spotted Vesta as a pinprick of light in the sky. Two hundred and four years later, as NASA's Dawn spacecraft prepares to begin orbiting this intriguing world, scientists now know how special this world is, even if there has been some debate on how to classify it.

Observations conducted with Integral satellite detected matter just escaping the powerful gravitational field of a black hole.

Joint observations by three observatories detected a brown dwarf with a temperature of just 100º C.

Mark your calendar. On March 19th, a full Moon of rare size and beauty will rise in the east at sunset. It's a super "perigee moon"- the biggest in almost 20 years.

On March 17th, NASA's MESSENGER probe will become the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury. It's a seminal moment in planetary exploration. Researchers can finally take a good long look at a rocky world that is both akin to Earth and shockingly alien.

Every day about 100 tons of meteoroids – fragments of dust and gravel and sometimes even big rocks – enter the Earth's atmosphere.

Recent observations made at the Calar Alto observatory of a new sub-class of supernova, show that not all supernova are spherical.

Based on observations from the Herschel Space Telescope (ESA), astronomers where able to estimate the minimum amount of dark matter needed to form galaxies.

On Feb. 6th, NASA's twin STEREO probes moved into position on opposite sides of the sun, and they are now beaming back uninterrupted images of the entire star - front and back.

At a distance of 2000 light years from Earth, the star Kepler 11 has 6 planets orbiting around it. The discovery was announced in the latest issue of Nature.

António da Silva, an astronomer at Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP) is one of the members of the Planck collaboration which participated in these discoveries.

The EPOXI probe (NASA) passed at a mere 700 km off the surface of Comet Hartley 2, getting the most detailed images of a comet’s surface.

Researchers at the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP) took part in the most accurate measurement of the age of a star.

The lunar probe Chang-e 2 was launched today, at 11h59m (portuguese time), from the Xichang sattelite launch base, in the southeast of China.

The fourteenth edition of the annual International Conference on Particle Physics and Cosmology will be held in Porto, in the week of August 22-26, 2011.

The portuguese "planet hunter" received today, in Armenia, an award for his contribution in the field of planetary systems

Most of the stellar mass of the brightest galaxies in distant clusters was found to have formed early on after the Big Bang, up to when the Universe was just some 4 thousand million years old.

Let the countdown begin. NASA's Dawn spacecraft is less than one year away from giant asteroid Vesta.

An European team of astronomers, including Nuno Cardoso Santos (Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto) and Alexandre Correia (Universidade de Aveiro), discovered the planetary system which more closely resembles our own, orbiting the star HD 10180, located at a distance of 127 light-years, in the Hydrus constellation (southern hemisphere).

Portuguese astronomer Nuno Cardoso Santos, from the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, is one of the winners of the first edition of the Viktor Ambartsumian International Prize. He and his colleagues Michel Mayor and Garik Israelian will share half a million dollars.

After a 36 year partnership, the UK withdraws from the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

In an article published in the online edition of Science Magazine, the team lead by Harold Levison (SwRI) says that famous comets, like Hale-Bopp, may have formed in other solar systems, and were later captured by the Sun's gravity.

The President of the Republic invited three dozen personalities that distinguished themselves in Portugal and abroad for a lunch.

Joining the German and Netherlands stations of LOFAR, a team of astronomers led by Olaf Wucknitz produced the first high-resolution radio images of a quasar.

Hubble found out that the stars of a million years-old star cluster haven’t reached equilibrium yet.

In a development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system's largest planet, one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared.

With Radio and Infrared observations, a team of astronomers was able to detect new star-forming regions, known as H II Regions.

Hubble found a planet orbiting so close to its parent star that it’s being eaten by the star.

X-ray observations with Chandra e XMM-Newton space telescopes detected a part of the missing “normal” matter.

Herschel space telescope has found a hole in space which will allow astronomers to have a glimpse on the last stages of star formation.

Two independent studies detected the presence of large quantities of water and complex organic molecules in the surface of asteroid 24 Themis.

Researchers unveiled "First Light" images from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, a space telescope designed to study the sun.

To celebrate 20 years of existence, the Hubble Space Telescope reveals today the most detail image ever of the Carina Nebula.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has finally seen lightning on Saturn.

After almost two centuries of doubt, a new light finally shone apon the origin of eclipsing binary Epsilon Aurigae, thanks to new observations from the CHARA interferometer.

Tomorrow, around 11:06 pm (UTC), an asteroid will "graze" the Earth, passing a little closer than the distance to the Moon.

After an extended period of low activity, the Sun finally "came back to life".

You can now follow CAUP’s latest news on Facebook and Twitter.

The results of the Office of Planning, Strategy Evaluation and Foreign Affairs - "The national scientific production 2004 – 2008”, show that Space Sciences are Portugal’s most competitive scientific field.

Last wednesday the european probe Mars Express (ESA) did its closest flyby to Mars largest moon - Phobos, passing just 67km above the surface.

Last February the ARENA consortium, of which Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP) is a partner, published the report “A Vision for European Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Antarctic station Concordia, Dome C”.

Last Thursday, ESA's Science Programme Committee decided which 3, of the 10 still being considered, proceed to the next stage of Cosmic Vision 2015-2025.

The most detailed images of Pluto’s surface to date, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, show that the surface of this dwarf planet is very dynamic.

A team led by an astronomer of the University of Toronto was able, thanks to observations with the VLT, to directly measure the spectra of an exoplanet.

This year's Leonid meteor shower peaks on Tuesday, November 17th.

A census of 500 stars, 70 of which with known planetary systems, established a connection between the presence of planets and the lithium deficiency known in the Sun. The discovery, published in the 12th November issue of Nature, was made by a team which includes Nuno Cardoso Santos and Sérgio Sousa.

An international team of researchers, including Nuno Cardoso Santos, researcher at Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, announced yesterday in a press conference, the discovery of 32 new exoplanets, using the spectrograph HARPS.

The ALMA astronomical observatory has taken another step forward — and upwards. One of its state-of-the-art antennas was carried for the first time to the 5000m plateau of Chajnantor, in the Chilean Andes, on the back of a custom-built giant transporter.

A team lead by CAUP astronomer Jorge Meléndez discovered a connection between the Sun's chemical composition, and the fact that our star has rocky planets. This result provides a new tool in the detection of extra-solar planets.

Nuno Cardoso Santos, researcher at the CAUP won one of the most prestigious European grants of the European Research Council (ERC) - "ERC Starting Grant 2009."

Six minutes and 39 seconds to be exact. That's the duration of this week's total solar eclipse - the longest of the 21st century.

Using the W.M. Keck and CFHT telescopes, in Mauna Kea (Hawaii), a team of astronomers was able to identify remnants of two supernovae, which exploded about 11 billion years ago.

On the 14th of June, ESA's space observatory Herschel “opened its eyes” for the first time, to observe the M51 galaxy in the infrared.

One of the most rare known objects in the Universe, a Magnetar (short for Magnetic Star), was observed with ESA's XMM-Newton and INTEGRAL observatories.

New simulations to the dynamics of the Solar System, for the next 5 billion years, got surprising results: There is a 1% chance that Mercury's orbit is destabilized in that period, and as a result, a slight chance of Mars, or even Venus, colliding with the Earth.

Observations made by the new adaptive optics camera NACO (VLT - ESO), led to the conclusion that, regardless of its surroundings, the proportion in which stars are born is the same everywhere in the Universe.

Data obtained by the European Space Agency's (ESA) space observatory XMM-Newton, allowed astronomers to do the closest observation to date of the edge of a supermassive black hole.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will launch on 14 May, next Thursday, by 14h12  the Planck Surveyor space mission from the Space Centre of Korou in French Guiana. The researcher of the Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto, Dr. Antonio da Silva was invited by ESA to participate in ceremonies launching.

ESO's Very Large Telescope has shown that a faint gamma-ray burst detected on the 23 of April 2009, is the signature of the explosion of the earliest, most distant known object in the Universe (a redshift of 8.2). The explosion apparently took place more than 13 billion years ago, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang.

A team of astronomers, which includes Nuno Santos from Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (CAUP), announced today the discovery of the smallest exoplanet yet discovered. With a mass close to 1.9 times the mass of the Earth, the planet Gliese 581e is, so far, the  exoplanet which most resembles the Earth.

At Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, the Planck Surveyor mission in getting ready to fly to space. 

NASA’s Kepler mission has successfully lunched to space last 2009 March 6. The scientific goals of that mission are search for extrasolar Earth-size planets and conduct precise measurements of the seismic activity of stars.

European Astronomer found a peculiar planet around the star HD80606, a double star on the Ursa Major constellation.  The planet has the longest known period for an observed transit planet (111 days).

The official Opening Ceremony of the IYA2009 in Portugal will take place in Casa da Música, next Saturday 31st of January.

The world's official timekeepers have added a "leap second" to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth's slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.

In 1572, a "new star" appeared in the sky which stunned astronomers and exploded ancient theories of the Universe.

Initial results obtained by CoRot study on the seismic activity of three solar-type stars show that they are a little warmer and bigger than our Sun. The celestial bodies have an activity on the surface, granulation, three times higher than that of the Sun and, with the time-scale is three times higher.
These test results allow predictions of several theoretical models that are important for understanding the phenomenon of oscillations in stars and their activity.

Astronomers have used ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer to conduct the first high resolution survey that combines spectroscopy and interferometry on intermediate-mass infant stars.

The PRIMA instrument of the ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) recently saw "first light" at its new home atop Cerro Paranal in Chile.

This is one of the first observations of a system in which the star does not appear to orbit perpendicular to the orbital plane of the planet.

Recent observations have shown that the classical T Tauri star TW Hya star does not have a short period extrasolar planet. The observed radial-velocity variation is induced by the presence of large stellar spots.

A team of European astronomers using the CoRot space observatory found the first extra-solar planet in synchronous orbit.

NASA's Phoenix spacecraft reports good health after Mars landing

Astronomers 'listen' to an exoplanet-host star and find its birthplace.

In the night of 20 to 21 February a lunar eclipse will take place.

Messenger (NASA) First Look at Mercury's Previously Unseen Side.

The United Nations has proclaimed 2009 to be the International Year of Astronomy

From January to June 2007, NASA’s New Horizonts spacecraft visited Jupiter and collected more than 700 separate observations of the Jovian system. The results are now being released in a special section of the Oct. 12 issue of the journal Science.

What will happen to our Earth when the Sun dies? This is one of the questions that have tormented the astronomers for ages. The discovery of a planet around the star V 391 Pegasi might shed some light on this problem.

Most of the stars in the known Universe are not alone. They usually live in binary systems. But sometimes, when one of the stars is a white dwarf, it gets too greedy and starts devouring its partner, exploding as a Supernova. This was observed in the galáxy NGC 1288.

A Space Weather webquiz will be available on-line until the middle of July. The global winner of the quiz will go to Andøya Rocket Range, in Norway, to watch the launch of a rocket.

How old are the oldest stars? Using ESO's VLT, astronomers recently measured the age of a star located in our Galaxy. The star, a real fossil, is found to be 13.2 billion years old, not very far from the 13.7 billion years age of the Universe.

Images made with ESO's New Technology Telescope at La Silla by a team of German astronomers reveal a rich circular cluster of stars in the inner parts of our Galaxy.

For the very first time, astronomers have witnessed the speeding up of an asteroid's rotation, and have shown that it is due to a theoretical effect predicted but never seen before.

50 years after the success of international cooperation called International Geophysical Year, the international heliophysical year begins.

The three iconic space pillars photographed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 might have met their demise, according to new evidence from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, astronomers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the California Institute of Technology, USA, have discovered what appears to be the first known triplet of quasars.

Astronomers are reporting remarkable new findings that shed light on a decade-long debate about one kind of supernovae, the explosions that mark a star's final demise: does the star die in a slow burn or with a fast bang?

Between 1 and 5 of January we will be able to watch the Quadrantids 2007.

The captivating appearance of this image of the starburst galaxy NGC 1313, taken with the FORS instrument at ESO's Very Large Telescope, belies its inner turmoil. The dense clustering of bright stars and gas in its arms, a sign of an ongoing boom of star births, shows a mere glimpse of the rough times it has seen.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has seen something never before seen on another planet - a hurricane-like storm at Saturn's south pole with a well-developed eye, ringed by towering clouds.

After determining the chemical composition of over 2000 stars in four of the nearest dwarf galaxies to our own, astronomers have demonstrated fundamental differences in their make-up, casting doubt on the theory that these diminutive galaxies could ever have formed the building blocks of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, they found that some hot, bright, and apparently young stars in the cluster present less carbon and oxygen than the majority of their sisters. This indicates that these few stars likely formed by taking their material from another star.

Astronomers have detected a new faint companion to the star HD 3651, already known to host a planet. This companion, a brown dwarf, is the faintest known companion of an exoplanet host star imaged directly and one of the faintest T dwarfs detected in the Solar neighbourhood so far.

On Wednesday, Nov 8th, the planet Mercury will pass directly in front the Sun. The transit lasts for almost five hours. Good views can be had from the Americas, Hawaii, Australia and all along the Pacific Rim.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered 16 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a variety of distant stars in the central region of our Milky Way galaxy.

With the VISIR instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have mapped the disc around a star more massive than the Sun. The very extended and flared disc most likely contains enough gas and dust to spawn planets.

Thanks to the unique possibilities offered by ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), astronomers have solved a 140-year-old mystery concerning active hot stars.

Looking in detail at the composition of stars with ESO's VLT, astronomers are providing a fresh look at the history of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. They reveal that the central part of our Galaxy formed not only very quickly but also independently of the rest.

The distant world whose discovery prompted leading astronomers to demote Pluto from the rank of "planet" has now been given its own official name: Eris.

Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite and a combination of orbiting and ground-based observatories have for the first time caught a supernova in the act of exploding.

SMART-1, a European Space Agency (ESA) lunar orbiter is about to crash into the Moon, and you may be able to see the impact.

Astronomers have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

A team of U.S. scientists has found the first direct evidence of the existence of dark matter.

On July 31st, a tiny sunspot was born. It popped up from the sun's interior, floated around a bit, and vanished again in a few hours. On the sun this sort of thing happens all the time and, ordinarily, it wouldn't be worth mentioning. But this sunspot was special: It was backward.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have discovered a rather unusual system, in which two planet-size stars, of different colours, orbit each other. One is a rather hot white dwarf, weighing a little bit less than half as much as the Sun. The other is a much cooler, 55 Jupiter-masses brown dwarf.

ESO's Very Large Telescope has taken images of three different 'Island Universes', each amazing in their own way, whose curious shapes testify of a troubled past, and for one, of a foreseeable doomed future.

The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) 12-m sub-milimetre telescope lives up to the ambitions of the scientists by providing access to the "Cold Universe" with unprecedented sensitivity and image quality.

There's a new crater on the Moon. It's about 14 meters wide, 3 meters deep.

ESO's VLT has helped scientists to discover a large primordial 'blob', more than 10 billion light-years away. The most likely scenario to account for its existence and properties is that it represents the early stage in the formation of a galaxy, when gas falls onto a large clump of dark matter.

Life is not easy, even for galaxies. Some indeed get so close to their neighbours that they get rather distorted. But such encounters between galaxies have another effect: they spawn new generations of stars, some of which explode.

The southern constellation Tucana (the Toucan) is probably best known as the home of the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. But Tucana also hosts another famous object: the globular cluster 47 Tucanae.

Two new studies, based on observations made with ESO's telescopes, show that objects only a few times more massive than Jupiter are born with discs of dust and gas, the raw material for planet making.

An international team of astronomers, announced today the discovery of a massive galaxy cluster at z=1.45! This cluster was identified as an extended X-ray source in the XMM Cluster Survey.

Using the ultra-precise HARPS spectrograph on ESO's 3.6-m telescope at La Silla (Chile), a team of European astronomers have discovered that a nearby star is host to three Neptune-mass planets. The innermost planet is most probably rocky, while the outermost is the first known Neptune-mass planet to reside in the habitable zone. This unique system is likely further enriched by an asteroid belt.

ESO's Very Large Telescope, equipped with the multi-mode FORS instrument, took an image of NGC 3190, a galaxy so distorted that astronomers gave it two names. And as if to prove them right, in 2002 it fired off, almost simultaneously, two stellar explosions, a very rare event.

Using a quasar located 12.3 billion light-years away as a beacon, a team of astronomers detected the presence of molecular hydrogen in the farthest system ever, an otherwise invisible galaxy that we observe when the Universe was less than 1.5 billion years old, that is, about 10% of its present age.

Hanging above the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) - one of our closest galaxies - in what some describe as a frightening sight, the Tarantula nebula is worth looking at in detail.

In 1995, Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 did something unexpected: it fell apart. For no apparent reason, the comet's nucleus split into at least three "mini-comets" flying single file through space.

After its five-month, 400-million-kilometre journey our Solar System following its lift-off on 9 November 2005, ESA's Venus Express spacecraft will finally arrive on 11 April at its destination: planet Venus.

Very cool brown dwarf discovered Around star in the Solar neighbourhood. Using Eso's Very Large Telescope in Chile, an international team of researchers discovered a brown dwarf belonging to the 24th closest stellar system to the Sun.

Studying several tens of distant galaxies, an international team of astronomers found that galaxies had the same amount of dark matter relative to stars 6 billion years ago as they have now. If confirmed, this suggests a much closer interplay between dark and normal matter than previously believed. The scientists also found that as many as 4 out of 10 galaxies are out of balance. These results shed a new light on how galaxies form and evolve since the Universe was only half its current age.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer at Cerro Paranal, Chile and the CHARA Interferometer at Mount Wilson, California, a team of French and North American astronomers has discovered envelopes around three Cepheids, including the Pole star.

Possibly similar to what our own Milky Way looks like, Messier 100 is a grand design spiral galaxy that presents an intricate structure. The galaxy was the target of the FORS1 multi-mode instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, which performed detailed observations of the newly found supernova SN 2006X.

Scientists celebrate another major milestone at Cerro Paranal in Chile, home of ESO's Very Large Telescope array. Thanks to their dedicated efforts, they were able to create the first artificial star in the Southern Hemisphere, allowing astronomers to study the Universe in the finest detail.

Astronomers, using the unique capabilities offered by the high-resolution spectrograph UVES on ESO's Very Large Telescope, have found a metal-rich hydrogen cloud in the distant universe. The result may help to solve the missing metal problem and provides insight on how galaxies form.

Based on observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope, a team of Italian astronomers reports that the stellar cluster Messier 12 must have lost to our Milky Way galaxy close to one million low-mass stars.

We tend to think of the North Star, Polaris, as a steady, solitary point of light that guided sailors in ages past. But there is more to the North Star than meets the eye. The North Star is actually a triple star system. And while one companion can be seen easily through small telescopes, the other hugs Polaris so tightly that it has never been seen until now.

Using a network of telescopes scattered across the globe, including the Danish 1.54m telescope at ESO La Silla (Chile), astronomers discovered a new extrasolar planet significantly more Earth-like than any other planet found so far. The planet, which is only about 5 times as massive as Earth, circles its parent star in about 10 years.

New Horizons has been successfully launched to Pluto. The spacecraft will reach the icy planet on 2015.

Using ESA's Integral observatory, an international team of researchers has been able to confirm the production of radioactive aluminium (Al 26) in massive stars and supernovae throughout our galaxy and determine the rate of supernovae - one of its key parameters.

Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, one... happy 2006!

A team of French and Swiss astronomers has discovered one of the lightest exoplanets ever found using the HARPS instrument on ESO’s 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla (Chile).

Using the newly installed AMBER instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, which combines the light from two or three 8.2-m Unit Telescopes thereby amounting to observe with a telescope of 40 to 90 meters in diameter, two international teams of astronomers observed with unprecedented detail the environment of two stars.

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have recorded a massive star moving at more than 2.6 million kilometers per hour.

Robert's Quartet is a family of four very different galaxies, located at a distance of about 160 million light-years, close to the centre of the southern constellation of the Phoenix.

The spacecraft Venus Express has been launched on 9 of November with successfully. This spacecraft is the first european probe to the planet Venus.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope to probe the ninth planet in our planet solar system, astronomers have discovered that Pluto may have not one, but three moons.

NASA space observatories glipse faint afterglow of nearby stellar explosion.

Near-infrared images of the active galaxy NGC 1097, obtained with the NACO adaptive optics instrument, disclose with unprecedented detail a complex central network of filamentary structure spiralling down to the centre of the galaxy.

ESO's VLT captures image of spiral galaxy NGC 1350.

Step outside tonight around midnight and look east. About halfway up the sky you'll see the planet Mars. It looks like an intense red star, the brightest light in the midnight sky other than the Moon.

Data from the NASA/ESA/ASI Cassini spacecraft indicate that Saturn's majestic ring system has its own atmosphere - separate from that of the planet itself.

The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) project has just passed another major milestone by successfully commissioning its new technology 12-m telescope

More than a half-century ago, Fred Whipple, suggested the "dirty snowball" model as a fait representation of comets

After 172 days and 431 million kilometers of deep space stalking, Deep Impact successfully reached out and touched comet 9P/Tempel 1

Hubble Space Telescope captured dramatic images of a new jet of dust streaming from the icy comet