In this photograph taken by Cassini, you can see the faint moon Pandora moving through Saturn's F ring. As a shepherd moon, Pandora and its partner Prometheus confine and shape the main F ring with its gravity. Pandora is 84 kilometers (52 miles) across. This image was taken on August 2, 2005, when Cassini was approximately 610,000 kilometers (379,000 miles) from Pandora.

There's a long chain of events that led from the collapse of our local cloud of gas and dust to the evolution of life here on Earth. Exactly how each of these steps unfolded is still a bit of a mystery, but scientists know that a few atomic combinations were necessary: water, and organic compounds containing carbon. Dying stars are the source for this carbon, which they belch out, creating a kind of carbon soot. From there, this soot is blasted by intense radiation to create more than 100 different molecules, including fatty acids and simple sugars.

Photographs of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope have been assembled into time-lapse movies that show the planet's dynamic atmosphere and satellites. This natural view image is what you'd see if you saw the planet with your own eyes.

After 5 years of construction, the Southern African Large Telescope is now online, and has captured its first images - the beautiful Lagoon Nebula, globular star cluster 47 Tucanae; and NGC6744. The observatory has a massive 10 x 11 metre hexagonal segmented mirror, and state of the art scientific instrumentation. This new observatory provides a good view into the southern skies, which are less covered than the northern hemisphere. More scientific instruments are still being installed, and should be completed within the next few months.

This beautiful photograph looks down at Saturn, and partially through its rings from the unlit side. Apart from being a pretty picture, scientists can use images like this to precisely measure the concentration of ring particles. If you look carefully, you can also see Saturn's tiny moon Atlas (32 km or 20 miles across), as a dark spot in front of the planet.

NASA's Spirit rover has reached the summit of Husband Hill, and is now taking some time to enjoy the view. After climbing for months, the hardy rover is now 106 m (348) feet higher than it was when it first landed. This view from above gives mission planners a chance to analyze the terrain in all directions and decide where to send Spirit next.

The ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray telescope is allowing astronomers to study the formation history of entire galaxy clusters. By studying these largest structures in the Universe, astronomers will better understand how galaxies interacted with each other in the past and in the future.

I just wanted to let you know that Phil Plait (from Bad Astronomy) and I have decided to merge our two discussion forums together into one super forum. With a combined 11,000ish members this will create one of the largest space and astronomy-related communities on the Internet. Phil and I felt that our two communities were very similar, and there's a lot of overlap between members, topics, discussions, etc, that this merger just made sense. We'll both be very active in this new forum, and be sharing administrative responsibilities.

I'm going to be taking the Universe Today forum offline on the evening of Saturday, September 3rd, and then we'll be merging the forums together. Hopefully within 24-48 hours we'll have the new forum live and running. If everything goes well all the posts from both forums will be nicely shuffled into the new structure. You should be able to just log into the new forum as you did before. I'll provide more details about how to actually reach it once it's live.

Our two news sites will remain separate, so we're just merging the forums.

You can read more details about the merge over on the Bad Astronomy forum.

Feel free to drop me an email if you have any questions or concerns.

Thanks!

Fraser Cain
Publisher
Universe Today

Astronomers have found a fast moving pulsar on a trajectory that'll take it completely out of the Milky Way. The object, called B1508+55, is located about 7,700 light-years from Earth. The incredibly sharp radio vision of the continent-wide Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) has tracked this pulsar moving at approximately 1,100 km/s (670 miles/s). By tracking its position back, the astronomers have calculated that it started out in the constellation Cygnus. A powerful nearby supernova explosion probably kicked it into its current trajectory.

This newest image released by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows the star cluster Trumpler 14. This cluster is located about 9,000 light years away from Earth and contains about 1,600 stars. It has one of the highest concentrations of massive, luminous stars in the Milky Way. The bright stars in the cluster are very young - less than 1 million years old - and will explode within a few million more years as powerful supernovae.

Astronomers working with the Subaru telescope have found a massive proto-star with a protoplanetary disk surrounding it. The star contains approximately 7 times the mass of the Sun, and astronomers weren't sure if such large stars would gather protoplanetary disks in the same way that less massive stars form them, such as our Sun. One theory, that massive stars are formed by collisions and mergers with smaller stars has lost ground because of this discovery.

Managers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have intentionally turned off one of its working three gyroscopes to try and lengthen the lifespan of the aging instrument. These gyros allow Hubble to turn and point at new locations in the sky. Engineers have figured out several techniques that will allow Hubble to perform the same science, but with just two gyros. Hopefully this will give Hubble an additional 8-months of operation, extending its availability into 2008.

My guest today is Simon Singh, author of many science-related books including Fermat's Enigma, and The Code Book. His latest book, Big Bang, investigates the origins of the search for our place in an ever expanding Universe. Simon speaks to me from his home in London, England. I just want to apologize in advance for the murky audio quality - that's what you get when you call London from Canada through Skype. I've got an audio transcript that you can refer to if you're have trouble making out what Simon said.

In this extreme contrast view of Saturn's rings, has been created by NASA in order to search for spokes. These are ghostly lanes of dust that NASA's Voyager spacecraft and the Hubble Space Telescope have seen in the past - so far, though, Cassini has failed to get a picture of them. The spokes are probably invisible because the Sun's angle to the rings is relatively high. As Saturn's summer in the southern hemisphere moves into autumn, the spokes should become visible again.

After examining more than 4,000 galaxies in a recent survey, astronomers have discovered that most large galaxies are filled with old stars, It was expected that these large galaxies would be regularly ingesting smaller galaxies, creating bursts of star formation. Instead, however, it's the smaller, fainter galaxies which seem to have all the hot star formation. The large, red galaxies contain the bulk of the mass in the nearby Universe, but very little is understood about their formation or evolution.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered that the long cracks discovered on the surface of Saturn's moon Enceladus are actually quite young, between 10 and 1,000 years old. These findings support a previous discovery that Enceladus has a very active geology, and its surface features have been changing quite recently. These cracks act like vents, allowing ice and vapour to spew out. The fact that Enceladus is so active came as a surprise to scientists, as it's hard for an object this small to hold onto its heat.