In addition to studying planets orbiting other stars, scientists are now able to study comets orbiting other stars.  Using the HARPS instrument on the ESO 3.6 metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, scientists have been looking at the star Bets Pictoris.  Beta Pictoris is located 63 light-years from Earth and is a young star at only 20 million years old.  The star is surrounded by a large protoplanetary disc.

Subtle changes in light from Beta Pictoris is caused by the passage of comets in front of the star.  The star is so bright compared to the comets themselves that imaging the comets is impossible.  So scientists 'observe' the comets by the light changes of the star.

There are two different families of comets around Beta Pictoris.  Old exo-comets have orbited the star many times and their ices are beginning to evaporate.  Young exo-comets seem to have been recently developed out of collisions of larger objects.

These studies lead to insight on comet production in the early formation of a solar system, much like our sun was 4.5 billion years ago.

Galaxy clusters are a large number of galaxies held together by gravity.  Surrounding the individual galaxies is hot gas.  As the hot gas cools, star formation begins.  But in these galaxy clusters the gases do not cool as expected, thus preventing star formation.

NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescope may now shed some light on the situation.  The answer may be turbulence.

Supermassive black holes exist in large galaxies in the middle of the galaxy clusters.  These black holes throw out vast amounts of energy as objects are sucked in.  The energy creates cavities in the hot gases.  This interaction creates turbulence.  The turbulence then can keep the gases hot for billions of years.  As long as the black hole continues to release energy, the turbulence is created keeping the gas hot.  As the black hole runs out of objects to suck in, the energy release stops, and in turn the turbulence stops allowing the gas to cool and star formation to begin.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been assisting in trying for find some targets for New Horizons to visit after its flyby of Pluto next year.  Hubble has identified three Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) that are potential targets.

The objects are about 10 times larger than typical comets and only about 1 to 2 percent the size of Pluto.  They range from about 34 miles (55 km) to 15 miles (25 km) across.  As they reside in the Kuiper Belt they have never flown into the inner solar system so they remain icy frozen well preserved samples of the early solar system.  They are located about a billion miles farther out than Pluto.  It would take New Horizons another three or four years to reach them.

New Horizons will arrive at Pluto in July 2015.  A proposal would then be put forward in late 2016 to extend the mission.

NASA's Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) has detected a vast amount of infrared light in space between galaxies.  This cosmic glow is as bright as all known galaxies combined.  The glow is thought be from stars that have been flung out into space.

When galaxies interact and merge it seems that many stars are flung out of the galaxies.  The infrared glow detected by CIBER has a blue spectrum.  Light from the first galaxies give off a redder spectrum.  The explanation for this is the blue spectrum glow is from stars thrown out of the early galaxies as they formed and merged in the early Universe.

The CIBER team is working on instruments with better measurements so they can begin testing this theory.  CIBER is launched on sub-orbital sounding rockets.