Most Massive Star Ever Weighs In

(NEWSER) - A monstrous black hole near the center of a distant galaxy is sucking up stars, gas and dust, and spitting out baby stars, NASA scientists have discovered. The black hole is 100 million times the mass of the sun, reports the Telegraph. It lies at the center of a galaxy 50 million light years away known as NGC-1097, and has been photographed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in California. More»

15-mile-wide black hole is smallest ever found

(NEWSER) - Astronomers have spotted the smallest black hole ever discovered, Reuters reports. It is just 15 miles across—the size of a city—but still has a pull strong enough to "stretch your body into a strand of spaghetti," said a NASA researcher. The relative pipsqueak weighs about as much as four suns, while black holes often weigh billions of times more. More»

Unprecedented spacewalk will make for spiffier 'scope

(NEWSER) - Astronauts will save—and drastically upgrade—the Hubble Space Telescope in an unprecedented mission this year, NewScientist Space reports. The mission will make the Hubble 90 times more powerful than it originally was, but will require spacewalkers to complete a delicate electronics repair job in zero gravity while wearing bulky spacesuits. Without the tune-up, Hubble would go offline by 2011. More»

Google Sky will boot up computer-chair space exploration

(NEWSER) - Launching off of the success of Google Earth, Google launched a new program today allowing armchair astronomers to chuck the telescope and gaze at the heavens from their monitors. Google Sky will harness Hubble photos along with a database of information, and feature more than one million stars and 200 million galaxies, the BBC reports. More»

(NEWSER) - Astronomers have discovered a ring of dark matter in a galaxy cluster about 5 billion light years away. The Hubble Telescope turned up an anomaly in the way stars in the area appear, which researchers think is a distortion caused by the intense gravity of the galactic "glue" holding the cluster together. More»