Earliest Known Galaxies Spied in Deep Hubble Picture

Compact, ultra-blue galaxies spied for the first time in the deep universe are the most distant—and therefore the youngest galaxies anyone has ever seen...

These galaxies started forming just 500 million years after the big bang, which is thought to have occurred around 13.7 billion years ago. That pushes back the known start of galaxy formation by about 1.5 billion years.......

Infrared space camera will throw new light on night sky

LOS ANGELES: Endlessly fascinated with the night sky, scientists are preparing to put a large, high-resolution infrared camera into orbit that will give a much clearer picture of what is in ''our solar neighbourhood''.
Because most telescopes plumb the heavens in visible light, vast landscapes of the cosmos are hidden from direct view. But the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, will photograph the entire night sky in infrared light. In the process, it will capture hundreds of thousands of previously unknown objects that are too cool and too dark to be seen.
The expected launch of the $US320 million ($350 million spacecraft from Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California was delayed until Monday due to bad weather...

Scientists extend black-hole frontier

Telescope spots most distant stellar-mass black hole in a dance of death




A newfound black hole that's left over from the explosion of a star is the most distant yet to be discovered by astronomers. The newly discovered black hole, which is about 15 times the mass of our sun, is also the second most massive of its kind on record.
And if that wasn't enough, the black hole is entwined with a star that will also soon become a black hole.
Up until now, the only stellar-mass black holes known to astronomers were found within the confines of our local cluster of nearby galaxies, the Local Group. These black holes weigh in at up to 10 times the mass of the sun.
The newfound black hole is leaving these records in the dust.
"This is the most distant stellar-mass black hole ever weighed, and it's the first one we've seen outside our own galactic neighborhood," said astronomer Paul Crowther of the University of Sheffield, one of the researchers who made the discovery.
Stellar-mass black holes are the final remnants of very massive stars. They are much smaller than so-called supermassive black holes, which are found at the center of most galaxies and can reach up to a billion times the mass of the sun.
X-ray signs
The new black hole was spotted in the spiral galaxy NGC 300 — 6 million light-years from Earth — with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. X-ray measurements made in 2007 with NASA's Swift observatory first hinted at the possible existence of the black hole as scientists probed the region around the galaxy's brightest X-ray source...

Biggest and Brightest Full Moon of 2010 Tonight

Tonight's full moon -- called the wolf moon -- will be the biggest and brightest full moon of the year. It offers anyone with clear skies an opportunity to identify easy-to-see features on the moon...

Jean Pierre do not forget to mention that your picture of star and blackhole, is artist rendering. We do not have telescopes so powerful yet. Maybe a kilometer wide multi mirror telescope in space would do the trick