The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is poised to launch a probe on a two-year mission to study the weather and explore the enigmatic surface of cloud-shrouded Venus.
It's so, so annoying when stuff gets mislaid, so it must be a great relief to astronomers to be able to say they've probably found the nearby universe's missing matter.
ESA's Herschel telescope has snapped an embryonic star likely to turn into one of the biggest and brightest in our galaxy within the next few hundred thousand years.
Using a CSIRO radio telescope, astronomers have caught an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust in the process of collapsing in on itself. They hope the discovery could help establish how massive stars form.
For the first time, water and organic molecules have been detected on an asteroid. The discovery lends plausibility to the theory that both life on earth and water arrived through asteroid strikes.
