Young pulsar shows its hand

small, dense object only twelve miles in diameter is responsible for this beautiful X-ray nebula that spans 150 light years. At the center of this image made by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is a very young and powerful pulsar, known as PSR B1509-58, or B1509 for short. The pulsar is a rapidly spinning neutron star which is spewing energy out into the space around it to create complex and intriguing structures, including one that resembles a large cosmic hand. In this image, the lowest energy X-rays that Chandra detects are red, the medium range is green, and the most energetic ones are colored blue. Astronomers think that B1509 is about 1,700 years old and is located about 17,000 light years away.

Fireworks in Helix nebula

Image taken by Subaru Telescope shows comet -shaped knots lighting up the Helix nebula.

A nebula is cloud of gas and dust in space. Some nebulas are regions where new stars are being formed, while others are the remains of dead or dying stars. Nebulas come in many shapes and sizes. There are four different types of nebulas- planetary , reflection, emision and absorption nebulas.

Helix nebula is located about 710 light years from Earth and was first planetary nebula in which knots were abserved.

Venus nicknamed as Earth twin

Venus and Earth both share a similar size, gravity and bulk composition and hence, sometimes it is nicknamed as Earth's twin. But with a thick cloak of sulphuric acid clouds and a surface pressure nearly one hundred times that of Earth , makes it less hospitable than Earth. Venus once possessed Earth-like oceans, which evaporated into space to leave a barren landscape.

Venus is a big planet, being heated by radioactive elements in its interior. Some areas in Venus appear to be composed of darker rock , which shows relatively recent volcanic flows.

Both Russia and America sent probes to Venus during the 1970s and 80s – Venera and Pioneer, respectively – that sampled rocks made of basalt. Basalt is formed from cooling lava erupted by volcanoes, and, as is the case on Earth, where magma up-wells along ocean ridges to make new oceanic crust.

The new map of Venus reveals lighter coloured and older rocks with characteristics similar to Earth's granitic continents. Granite is created when basaltic rocks are forced down into the fiery interior of the planet by the process of plate tectonics, which builds and destroys the Earth's crust in an endless cycle. Water combines with the basalt to form granite and the mixture is reborn through volcanic eruptions.

According to the planetary scientists if there is granite in Venus then there must have been ocean in the past.

Solar wind tans young asteroids

Unlike human skin which is damaged by prolonged exposure to sunlight over a lifetime, an asteroid's surface is aged in the first instances of its life.

Of course, the time scales of the exposure are much different: for an asteroid the damage is done over a period of one million years, but this is still a very short timeframe compared with the 4.6 billion year age of the Solar System itself.

New observations conducted using ESO's New Technology Telescope at La Silla and the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, astronomers have shed some light on this mystery. The astronomers looked at freshly exposed asteroid surfaces (caused by the collision of two asteroids) and noticed that they change colour in less than a million years.

The charged, fast moving particles in the solar wind damage the asteroid's surface at an amazing rate.The solar wind contains highly energetic particles that bombard the exposed surfaces of asteroids, eroding the molecules and crystals on the surface and rearranging them into different configurations with distinct colours and properties.