June 29, 2011 -A team of European astronomers has used ESO’s Very Large Telescope and a host of other telescopes to discover and study the most distant quasar found to date.
This brilliant beacon, powered by a black hole with a mass two billion times that of the Sun, is by far the brightest object yet discovered in the early Universe.

“This quasar is a vital probe of the early Universe. It is a very rare object that will help us to understand how supermassive black holes grew a few hundred million years after the Big Bang,” says Stephen Warren, the study’s team leader.

June 23, 2011- Using the VISIR instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have imaged a complex and bright nebula around the supergiant star Betelgeuse in greater detail than ever before.

This structure, which resembles flames emanating from the star, is formed as the behemoth sheds its material into space. Betelgeuse, a red supergiant in the constellation of Orion, is one of the brightest stars in the night sky.

It is also one of the biggest, being almost the size of the orbit of Jupiter — about four and half times the diameter of the Earth’s orbit.

June 30, 2011 - Scientists know what the universe looked like when it was a baby.

They know what it looks like today. What they don't know is how it looked in its youth.

Thanks to technological advances, however, scientists hope to complete the photo album and provide a picture of how the cosmos developed into the kind of place that could support life like that found on Earth.

They plan to gather these never-before-obtained insights with a potentially "game-changing" instrument that is expected to be 10,000 times more sensitive than the current state-of-the-art.

June 28, 2011 - NASA's new video series offers the public a fast and fun way to learn about scientific discoveries and facts about Earth, the solar system and beyond.

Called "ScienceCasts," the videos are created by an astrophysicist and a team of agency narrators and videographers.

The videos are posted online every Thursday afternoon at approximately 4 p.m. EDT. The format is designed to increase understanding of the world of science through simple, clear presentations.

June 30, 2011 - ESA’s Integral gamma-ray observatory has provided results that will dramatically affect the search for physics beyond Einstein.

It has shown that any underlying quantum ‘graininess’ of space must be at much smaller scales than previously predicted.
 
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity describes the properties of gravity and assumes that space is a smooth, continuous fabric.

Yet quantum theory suggests that space should be grainy at the smallest scales, like sand on a beach.