On Earth, thieves steal everything from diamonds to art to bags full of money. In space, gas - fuel for making stars - is a commodity worth the price of theft. New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveal a distant, massive galaxy in the act of ripping off vast reservoirs of gas - the equivalent of one billion suns - from its smaller, neighbor galaxy. The stolen gas, which has become scorching hot during the heist, will likely cool down and get turned into new stars and planets........

New Haven, Conn. Discovery of the largest example of a small black hole one formed from the collapse of a single massive star at the end of its lifetime has led researchers to revaluate of how black holes come into being, as per a report in Nature. The theory we operated with for the last decade was that single-star black holes are formed from the remnants of massive stars the more massive the star, the more massive the remnant. But, all of the stellar mass black holes were expected to be in the range of 10 times the mass of the sun or less, since only the core regions of the star would collapse, said Charles Bailyn, the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale, and a member of the research team........

Researchers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., are taking advantage of the opportunity to carry promising technologies into orbit for evaluation. For MidSTAR-2, midshipmen are in the process of developing a satellite bus, which is the main portion of the satellite. It is similar to the prior MidSTAR-1 satellite, which was launched earlier in 2007. The MidSTAR-1 satellite was a highly successful proof of design for the MidSTAR-2 satellite bus design concept........

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft has used its onboard High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) to take a colour image of a region of Mars in the vicinity of the intended landing site of Beagle 2. H20 crater. Credit: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance OrbiterIncluded in the image is new coverage of the crater H2O which was considered by the Beagle 2 team as unique in the area that had been searched for evidence of the missing Lander. Beagle 2 was targeted to land in an ellipse approximately 50km x 10km in size........

A pair of rare celestial alignments that occurred in November 2003 helped an international team of astronomers investigate the far-off world of Titan. In particular, the alignments helped validate the atmospheric model used to design the entry trajectory for ESA's Huygens probe. Now the unique results are helping to place the descent of Huygens in a global context, and to investigate the upper layers of Titan's atmosphere........

The aurora is a bright glow observed in the night sky, usually in the polar zone. For this reason some scientists call it a "polar aurora" (or "aurora polaris"). In northern latitudes, it is known as the aurora borealis, which is named after the Roman goddess of the dawn, Aurora, and the Greek name for north wind, Boreas. Especially in Europe, it often appears as a reddish glow on the northern horizon, as if the sun were rising from an unusual direction. The aurora borealis is also called the northern lights since it is only visible in the North sky from the Northern Hemisphere. The aurora borealis most often occurs from September to October and from March to April. Its southern counterpart, aurora australis, has similar properties........

The deepest reaches of space are permeated by a cloak of infrared radiation, an uneven energy swath generated by long-dead objects from the early universe. Now, researchers have teased apart overlapping signals from that cosmic infrared background, building upon an earlier study to show that uneven patches of energy may actually be clusters of the first objects to emerge from the Big Bang........

Eleven months ago, NASA's Stardust mission touched down in the Utah desert with the first solid comet samples ever retrieved from space. Since then, nearly 200 researchers from around the globe have studied the minuscule grains, looking for clues to the physical and chemical history of our solar system. Eventhough years of work remain to fully decipher the secrets of comet Wild 2, scientists are sure that it contains some of the most primitive and exotic chemical structures ever studied in a laboratory........

ESA's gamma-ray observatory, Integral, has spotted a rare kind of gamma-ray outburst. The vast explosion of energy allowed astronomers to pinpoint a possible black hole in our Galaxy. The outburst was discovered on 17 September 2006 by staff at the Integral Science Data Centre (ISDC), Versoix, Switzerland. Inside the ISDC, astronomers constantly monitor the data coming down from Integral because they know the sky at gamma-ray wavelengths can be a swiftly changing place........

Images from the world's first high definition television (HDTV) broadcast from space flashed across the screen on Nov 15th in Times Square. On Nov. 15, 2006, NASA made history with the first live HDTV broadcasts from space, in cooperation with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Discovery HD Theater and Japanese broadcast network NHK........

Waves of gray-brown smoke washed over the mountains southeast of Los Angeles and out over the Pacific on Oct. 26, 2006, on the same day on which four firefighters were killed fighting the blaze. West of Palm Springs, Calif., the Esperanza Fire had ballooned under the influence of Santa Ana winds to encompass more than 19,000 acres as of the morning of Oct. 27, as per the daily report from the National Interagency Fire Center. Racing through grass, brush, and timber, the blaze had forced hundreds to evacuate, and it killed several firefighters who were working to protect homes. Fire officials are reporting the cause of the blaze as arson........

So far, only one craft has flown in space, sending test pilots to the final frontier at an expense of $25 million-plus to win the $10 million Ansari X Prize. Market right now doesn't show the prospects that were expected by the investors in the space tourism industry. But this doesn't mean that people in the real world don't have any respect for this industry. Space Tourism is not aimed at "space geeks" only. This seems the way it is because people in the real world can't afford the million dollars ride into the space and it looks like they are less bothered about what is going on in the space tourism industry........

NASA researchers and their international partners using the new Japanese Suzaku satellite have collected a startling new set of black hole observations, revealing details of twisted space and warped time never before seen with such precision. The observations include clocking the speed of a black hole's spin rate and measuring the angle at which matter pours into the void, as well as evidence for a wall of X-ray light pulled back and flattened by gravity........

Researchers on NASA's Cassini mission have spied a new, continuously changing feature that provides circumstantial evidence that a comet or asteroid recently collided with Saturn's innermost ring, the faint D ring. Imaging researchers see a structure in the outer part of the D-ring that looks like a series of bright ringlets with a regularly spaced interval of about 30 kilometers (19 miles). An observation made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in 1995 also saw a periodic structure in the outer D ring, but its interval was then 60 kilometers (37 miles). Thus, unlike a number of features in the ring system which have not changed over the last few decades, the interval of this pattern has been decreasing over time........

On 15 September, flight controllers at ESA's Space Operations Centre watched tensely as 'Rumba', No. 1 in the four-spacecraft Cluster fleet, was switched into a low-power, deep hibernation mode. The aim was to survive a challenging eclipse. Each year, in autumn, the Cluster fleet must pass several times through the Earth's shadow with respect to the Sun. During these eclipses, which last about three hours, sunlight is blocked by the Earth and the spacecraft solar panels cannot generate electricity........