Jan. 8--The bright lights coming from Waynesboro's west end are having the unintended effect of making the night sky harder to see. Roland Beard, an amateur astronomer in Crozet, says the changes in viewing the western sky have been "dramatic" in the last few years. "In about 10 years, about 80 percent of the population will not be able to see the sky for all intents and purposes," Beard said.

Jan. 8--By lofting a set of radio antennas into the sky with a giant balloon, NASA astrophysicist Alan Kogut hoped that somewhere over West Texas it would pick up signals emanating from the early universe, 13 billion years in the past. "We went out looking for one thing and found this ubiquitous background of radio noise in the universe that's completely unexplained," said Kogut, who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia before studying astrophysics at Princeton and later working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. After more than a year checking for possible mistakes, he and his colleagues announced their discovery yesterday at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Long Beach, Calif.

U.S. astronomers say planets may be able to form around certain types of binary star systems. Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology said a disk of molecules discovered orbiting a pair of twin young suns in the constellation Sagittarius suggests binary systems host planets. "We think the molecular gas orbiting these two stars almost literally represents 'smoking gun' evidence of recent or possibly ongoing 'giant' (Jupiter-like) planet formation around the binary star system," he said in a release.

Jan. 6--A former astronaut who has made four trips into space is reportedly a leading candidate for the top job at NASA. If selected by President-elect Barack Obama, Charles Bolden Jr., 62, a retired Marine Corps general who makes his home in Houston's Bay Area, would be the first black to head the space agency. But Bolden has remained familiar with NASA's workings and personnel.

WASHINGTON - Take that, Andromeda! For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

IT is one of the darkest places in the world a cold and lonely wilderness in the south of Scotland. On a clear night the heart of Galloway Forest Park offers one of Earth's clearest views of the cosmos. More than 70 per cent of the UK population can no longer see the Milky Way as a result of careless and wasteful use of outdoor light beaming into the sky.

PASADENA, California--Five years after the NASA rover Spirit landed on Mars, the six-wheeled robotic geologist and its twin Opportunity are still on the job. Expectations were far lower when Spirit bounced to the surface in a cocoon of airbags on Jan. 3, 2004, followed 21 days later by Opportunity: The goal was to try to operate each solar-powered rover for at least three months. Before the missions were launched, Orlando Figueroa, then-director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program, had described the rovers as "stepping stones for the rest of the decade" of Martian exploration.

A comet struck North America 13,000 years ago, triggering massive flooding and fires followed by a short ice age, researchers said Friday. The team led by Douglas Kennett, an archaeologist, said its discovery of nanodiamonds -- diamonds visible only under a microscope -- associated with a layer of black soil containing burned debris shows that a comet was the cause, the Los Angeles Times reported. "There's no other way we can interpret the presence of these diamonds other than an extraterrestrial impact," said James Kennett, a paleo-oceanographer and Douglas Kennett's father.

GREEN BANK, W.Va. - Of all the threats to scientific research Wesley Sizemore has stymied over the years, satellites and cell phone towers don't stick in his memory quite like the possessive old hound and its treasured heating pad. Sizemore is an interference hunter, vigilantly pursuing stray electromagnetic signals that bedevil researchers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, which sits on 13,000 square miles tucked away in the nation's only radio-free quiet zone.

DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, California--High atop Dante's View, overlooking sheets of salt flats and ribbons of sand dunes, night watcher Dan Duriscoe shone a laser beam at the North Star and steadied his digital camera at the starry heavens. Acclaimed for its ink black skies, Death Valley, the hottest place in North America, also ranks among the nation's unspoiled stargazing spots. Duriscoe, a soft-spoken, mustachioed physical scientist with the National Park Service, is part of a roving federal team of night owls whose job is to gaze up at the sky and monitor for light pollution in national parks.

BANGALORE: Chandrayaan-1 India's first Moon mission has confirmed the presence of iron in the lunar soil and, for the first time, revealed changes in rock and mineral composition. The sighting of the mineral is the first in the past five years and only the second in 10 years following a US mission in 1998-99 and European mission in 2003. Within two months of its launch, Chandrayaan-1 has found iron on the moon through a Nasa instrument, moon mineralogy mapper (M3).

Dec. 26--When Stephen Pompea sat inside a UC Berkeley cafe and pulled a black telescope from its protective case, he did so with the care reserved for a fine instrument. Pompea, project director of the International Year of Astronomy 2009's U.S. program, led the design for the $10 instrument, which sports a lens found only in pricier models, and light-catching features that make it an "urban telescope" capable of reducing glare from city lights. Pompea and astronomers around the globe are pinning great hopes on this simple and sophisticated "Galileoscope," named in honor of the 400th anniversary of the year Galileo Galilei turned a telescope skyward and subsequently redefined humanity's sense of place in the cosmos.

VATICAN CITY--Galileo Galilei is going from heretic to hero. The Vatican is recasting the most famous victim of its Inquisition as a man of faith, just in time for the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope and the U.N.-designated International Year of Astronomy next year. In May, several Vatican officials will participate in an international conference to re-examine the Galileo affair, and top Vatican officials are now saying Galileo should be named the "patron" of the dialogue between faith and reason.

An international team of scientists is working under Antarctica's snow-covered surface to build the world's largest neutrino telescope. The telescope -- called "IceCube" -- will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica when it is completed in 2011, said University of Delaware Professor Thomas Gaisser, one of the project's lead scientists. "IceCube will provide new information about some of the most violent and far-away astrophysical events in the cosmos," said Gaisser, who is managing the deployment of the telescope's surface array of detectors, known as "Ice Top."

The U.S. space agency says its Cassini spacecraft has detected Saturn's small moon Enceladus is showing signs of ongoing changes at its south polar surface. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said close views of the southern polar region -- where jets of water vapor and icy particles spew from vents within the moon's distinctive "tiger stripe" fractures -- provide surprising evidence of Earth-like tectonics. "They yield new insight into what may be happening within the fractures," NASA said, noting the latest data on the plume -- the huge cloud of vapor and particles fed by the jets that extend into space -- show it varies over time and has a far-reaching effect on Saturn's magnetosphere.

LOS ANGELES--Observations from the international Cassini spacecraft suggest Saturn's largest moon may have active or recently active ice volcanoes. Radar images point to flows on the surface of Titan that could result from volcanoes spewing chilled liquid from the interior, mission scientists reported Monday. Previous Titan flybys suggested ice volcanoes existed, and scientists believe they would erupt with ammonia, methane and water instead of lava.

Council slated over the 'utterly shocking' state of old building THE Astronomer Royal for Scotland has hit out at the "utterly shocking" condition of the City Observatory on Calton Hill, as the amateur stargazers based there prepare to abandon it. John Brown, who is also honorary president of the Astronomical Society of Edinburgh, called for extra security at the observatory after repeated thefts of lead from the roof left the inside sodden.

Dec. 12--CAPE CANAVERAL NASA Administrator Mike Griffin said Thursday that he was fully cooperating with the incoming Barack Obama administration and was "appalled" by a report that he was obstructing efforts by the president-elect's transition team to get information about the agency. In a statement, Griffin called the report in Thursday's Orlando Sentinel "simply wrong."

U.S. space agency officials say the Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered the dimmest known star-like objects in the universe. The record goes to twin brown dwarfs, or "failed" stars, each of which shines with only one-millionth the light of our sun, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said. But when the Spitzer Space Telescope observed the object in infrared mode, it measured the extreme faintness and low temperature for the first time.