Ana V. Aceves

In 1946, 12 years before NASA was created, a Yale University astrophysicist published a paper about the advantages of conducting astronomy research from space. A large space telescope would help, the astrophysicist, named Lyman Spitzer, argued. (Little did he know, an infrared space telescope launched in 2003 would be named after him.) Forty-four years later, on April 24, 1990, the space shuttle Discovery launched from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

Astronomers have discovered a cluster of galaxies coming together just 770 million years after the Big Bang. An artist's impression of a protocluster in the infant universe. ESO / M. Kornmesser The gradual formation of giant galaxy clusters was well underway when the universe was 770 million years old, only 5.5% of its present age.

In a first, an amateur astronomer has found four of five "lost" Jovian moons using images from a publicly available archive. The feat allows a recalculation of their orbits, leaving only one of Jupiter's 79 known satellites still missing. The formerly missing moons are among a group of 23 small (1–4 km) Jovian satellites that Scott Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science) and colleagues reported in 2003.