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WASHINGTON -- To ensure continuation of the extraordinary scientific output of the Hubble Space Telescope and to prepare for its eventual de-orbiting, NASA should send a space shuttle mission, not a robotic one, says a new congressionally requested report from the National Academies' National Research Council. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

Unlike humans, stars are born with all the weight they will ever have. A human's birth weight varies by just a few pounds, but a star's weight ranges from less than a tenth to more than 100 times the mass of our Sun. Although astronomers know that stars come in a variety of masses, they are still stumped when it comes to figuring out if stars have a weight limit at birth. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

Computer simulations of how black holes accrete matter show surprising violence and turbulence, challenging many commonly held assumptions about the nature of this phenomenon. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) have measured the motion across the sky of a galaxy nearly 2.4 million light-years from Earth. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

How do you hide something as big and bright as a galaxy? You smother it in cosmic dust. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope saw through such dust to uncover a hidden population of monstrously bright galaxies approximately 11 billion light-years away. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

What happens when a galaxy falls in with the wrong crowd? The irregular galaxy NGC 1427A is a spectacular example of the resulting stellar rumble. Under the gravitational grasp of a large gang of galaxies, called the Fornax cluster, the small bluish galaxy is plunging headlong into the group at 600 kilometers per second or nearly 400 miles per second. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

Jupiter shows intense X-ray emission associated with auroras in its polar regions. Extended monitoring by Chandra showed that the auroral X-rays are caused by highly charged particles crashing into the atmosphere above Jupiter's poles. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- A new theory of how planets form finds havens of stability amid violent turbulence in the swirling gas that surrounds a young star. These protected areas are where planets can begin to form without being destroyed. The theory will be published in the February issue of the journal Icarus. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

Using an innovative camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, scientists have captured images of a radiation belt inside the rings of Saturn and have the clearest picture yet of the planet’s giant magnetosphere, according to a mid-year report of the spacecraft published today in the journal Science. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

Scientists detected a flash of light from across the Galaxy so powerful; it bounced off the moon and lit up the Earth's upper atmosphere. The flash was brighter than anything ever detected from beyond our Solar System, and it lasted over a tenth of a second. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

New findings include wandering and rubble-pile moons; new and clumpy Saturn rings; splintering storms and a dynamic magnetosphere. <b>NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

The Swift satellite's Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) has seen first light, capturing an image of the Pinwheel Galaxy, long loved by amateur astronomers as the "perfect" face-on spiral galaxy. The UVOT now remains poised to observe its first gamma-ray burst and the Swift observatory, launched into Earth orbit in November 2004, is now fully operational.<b> NOTE: French, German, and Italian translations follow...</b>

The Optec Pyxis Rotator gets graded, rated, and rotated by Bob Benamati...

Cassini-Huygens supplied new evidence about why Titan has an atmosphere, making it unique among all solar system moons, a University of Arizona planetary scientist says. (Article by Lori Stiles. University of Arizona)

A giant flash of energy from a supermagnetic neutron star thousands of light-years from Earth may shed a whole new light on scientists' understanding of such mysterious "magnetars" and of gamma-ray bursts.