When Karl Aston saw a fireball in the sky, his first thought was of chasing it.

The St. Louis research chemist, whose in-laws live in Quincy, hunts for and collects meteorites in his spare time. After a meteorite streaked across the night sky on April 14 as a brilliant fireball visible to the naked eye across the Upper Midwest, Aston traveled to its landing place in rural southwest Wisconsin and found one of the largest discovered chunks of the rock.

Scientists are thrilled by discoveries like Aston's, pointing to the modern rarity of visible meteorites and the clues about space and Earth their remnants provide.

"This is really top-notch science," said Gregg Maryniak, director of the St. Louis Science Center's James S. McDonnell Planetarium, which will display Aston's meteorite chunk later this summer.

Aston took up meteorite hunting and collecting three years ago. He has since networked with many other meteorite hunters around the country, developing "a lot of camaraderie and friendly competition" with them.

A thick haze of organic material let the early Earth soak up the sun's warmth without absorbing harmful ultraviolet rays, according to a new study.

The model offers a new twist on an old puzzle: Although the sun was so dim billions of years ago that the Earth should have been a ball of ice, the young planet had liquid oceans capable of supporting life.

"Given these recent papers, we can probably say the early faint sun problem is not one of the problems anymore in solving the origin of life," said astrophysicist Christopher Chyba of Princeton University, who was not involved in the new work.

The sun should have been up to 30 percent less bright 3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago, according to studies of the lifecycles of sun-like stars. If the Earth's atmosphere had the same composition then as it does now, it would have frozen over completely, like Jupiter's moon Europa. But geological records show the Earth was at least as warm and wet then as it is today.

Radar-invisible stealth shed on horizon?

Chinese scientists have stunned the world of boffinry by fashioning an artificial "black hole" generator out of copper-coated circuit boards.

Disappointingly this is not a black hole in the normal sense of a universe-wrackingly dense lump of hypercompressed matter, exerting a gravitational pull so fearsome that not even light itself can escape - hence the blackness - of the sort which, some say, might be created by means of certain exotic experiments and then gobble up the entire Earth (and/or Moon and Sun) in a terrifying yet unambiguously newsworthy apocalypse incident.

No, this is a different kind of black hole altogether: but just like a proper black hole, electromagnetic radiation cannot escape from it. Technically it is referred to as an "omnidirectional electromagnetic absorber".

The device traps microwaves coming from all directions and "spirals" them in to its centre, converting them into heat with 99 per cent efficiency. Thus it is "black" in the microwave band - and its builders, Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui of the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, believe that similar devices could be made to work in the visible spectrum also.

Not just one but two veteran planetary imagers caught the shots of a lifetime on June 3rd, when they both video recorded a tiny, brilliant flare on Jupiter swelling and fading around 20:31 Universal Time. The flare brightened and faded in less than two seconds. Its progress is recorded on many frames of each video.

The flare may have looked small from Earth, but it must have been titanic to be seen at all from Jupiter's distance - and on Jupiter's daylit side. It was presumably the impact of an asteroid or comet nucleus.

Veteran planetary imager Anthony Wesley, an amateur in Murrumbateman, Australia, was recording in red light at the lucky moment in order to create another of his many stacked-video color stills of Jupiter. The impact "doesn't seem to have left any mark, so it probably burned up in the upper atmosphere before it reached the cloud deck," suggests Wesley.

At the same moment, Christopher Go was imaging Jupiter several thousand miles away in the Phillipines. He was taking blue frames at the moment of impact. Go's video of the Jupiter impact provides ironclad confirmation of the event!

The flare occurred at longitude 248.8° in Jupiter's System I, 342.7° in System II, and 159.4° in System III. The latitude is 16° south. This region should be visible from about 4:00 to 6:30 June 4th UT, favoring observers in Europe and Africa when Jupiter is up before dawn. The impact site will return to good view about every 9 hours 56 minutes thereafter.

Wesley is well known for discovering an impact on Jupiter last July 19 - by the dark mark it left behind - spurring telescopes around the world (and above it) to study the serendipitous event.

Stay tuned for updates!

An amateur Australian astronomer has set the space-watching world on fire after discovering that a rare comet or asteroid had crashed into Jupiter, leaving an impact the size of Earth.

Anthony Wesley, 44, a computer programmer from Murrumbateman, a village north of Canberra, made the discovery about 1am yesterday using his backyard 14.5-inch reflecting telescope.

The impact would have occurred no more than two days earlier and will only be visible for another few days.

Within hours, his images had spread across the internet on science websites.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed the discovery at 9pm yesterday using its large infrared telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

By exploiting the exquisite image quality of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and comparing two observations made ten years apart astronomers have, for the first time, managed to measure the tiny motions of several hundred young stars within the central cluster of the star-forming region NGC 3603.

The team was surprised to find that the stars are moving in ways that are at odds with the current understanding of how such clusters evolve. The stars in the cluster have not "settled down" as expected.

With a mass of more than 10 000 suns packed into a volume with a diameter of a mere three light-years, the massive young star cluster in the nebula NGC 3603 is one of the most compact stellar clusters in the Milky Way [1] and an ideal place to test theories for their formation.

In December 2009, Herald de Paris published a curious article about the likely discovery of a submerged city in the Western Caribbean. While the discovery could have tremendous implications for modern archaeology, the story remained, forgive the pun, largely under the radar.

Today, we sit down with architectural historian and archaeologist Jes Alexander, who spearheaded the research team, to get the first-hand details of what could be a piece of real-life Atlantis.

A seemingly normal rock found in a ditch along a stretch of road in north central Oregon has turned out to be a stone from outer space that travelled across millions of miles and billions of years to reach Earth, according to researchers studying the stone.

The 40-pound, cone-shaped space rock, which is about the size of a beach ball, was picked up by Donald Wesson and his wife Debbie during the fall of 1999 as they drove through Oregon's wheat country on their way home to Washington. It is the fifth meteorite to be found in the northwestern state.

Deep sea fish species found in the north Pacific Ocean have mysteriously been caught in the southwest Atlantic, on the other side of the world.

It is unclear how the animals, a giant rattail grenadier, pelagic eelpout and deep sea squid, travelled so far.

Their discovery 15,000km from their usual home raises the possibility that deep sea currents can transport animals from one polar region to another.

Details are published in the journal Deep Sea Research part I.

"These findings were completely unexpected," says Dr Alexander Arkhipkin of the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department, based in Stanley, on the Falkland Islands in the southwest Atlantic Ocean.

Since 1987, the Falkland Islands Fisheries Department has performed surveys of fish caught by commercial and research fishing trawlers travelling above the Patagonian Shelf and slope around the islands.

Commercial longline catches of Patagonian toothfish have also been examined.

Recently, these catches have brought to the surface animals previously unknown in the southwest Atlantic.

On the third week of July 1994, comet Shoemaker-Levy crashed into Jupiter's fiery atmosphere. NASA says that another "mystery space object" hit during the same week but 15 years later, leaving a bruise as big as the Pacific Ocean.

Judging by the series of images taken by Hubble's newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3, the current theory is that the object was a 1,600-foot wide asteroid. Analysis of the angle and size of the bruise reveals that the mystery object possibly came from the Hilda belt, a group of 1,100 asteroids orbiting near Jupiter. [NASA via NASA Goddard Twitter]