An international team of astronomers has recently captured the image of a new star, a very young brown dwarf. They discovered a unique, rare phenomenon: the proximity between the brown dwarf and its enormous stellar companion is as close as Uranus and the sun.

The newly imaged brown dwarf is among the youngest stars ever seen. It is located in a tight orbit around a nearby sun-like star, which is huge, with mass about 36 times larger than Jupiter's (which is the largest planet in our solar system). The brown dwarf is dubbed PZ Tel A and its star-like neighbor is dubbed PZ Tel B. The distance between these stellar objects was measured at 18 Astronomical Units (AU), which is extremely close in comparison to the average 50 AUs. Furthermore, in just the past year the researchers observed PZ Tel B moving quickly outward from its parent star; usually, in such a short span of time stars are much more passive.

Brown dwarves are sub-stellar objects, and unlike most stars they do not maintain hydrogen-burning nuclear fusion reactions in their cores (due to smaller mass). They have fully convective surfaces and interiors, with no chemical differentiation by depth.

Better catch Jupiter next week in the night sky. It won't be that big or bright again until 2022.

Jupiter will pass 368 million miles from Earth late Monday, its closest approach since 1963.

You can see it low in the east around dusk. Around midnight, it will be directly overhead. That's because Earth will be passing between Jupiter and the sun, into the wee hours of Tuesday.

The solar system's largest planet already appears as an incredibly bright star. The only thing brighter in the night sky right now is our moon.

A wall painting (fresco) of Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune, was exposed during the 11th season of excavation at the Sussita site, on the east shore of the Sea of Galilee, which was conducted by researchers of the University of Haifa. Another female figure was found during this season, of a maenad, one of the companions of the wine god Dionysus.

"It is interesting to see that although the private residence in which two goddesses were found was in existence during the Byzantine period, when Christianity negated and eradicated idolatrous cults, one can still find clear evidence of earlier beliefs," said Prof. Arthur Segal and Dr. Michael Eisenberg of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, who headed the excavation. The city of Sussita is located within the Sussita National Park under the management of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, which has accompanied and assisted the excavation teams this season in enabling the continuation of excavation work and the conservation of the archaeological finds.

During the course of the excavations conducted by the team from the University of Concordia under the direction of Prof. Mark Schuler, in a residence that appeared, by the quality and complexity of its construction, to belong to one of the city notables, the excavators reached an inner courtyard with a small fountain at its center. Near the fountain they found a fresco of Tyche, who was apparently deified as the city's goddess of fortune. Her head is crowned, her youthful gaze is focused, and she has abundant brown hair beneath her crown. According to the researchers, artistic analysis has indicated that the wall painting may be dated to the end of the Roman period or the beginning of the Byzantine period (3th centuries C.E.).

UK scientist unearths 5,000-year-old rock art, including drawing of a mounted hunter, in Somaliland

Striking prehistoric rock art created up to 5,000 years ago has been discovered at almost 100 sites in Somaliland on the Gulf of Aden in eastern Africa.

A local team headed by Dr Sada Mire - of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London (UCL) - made the finds which included a man on horseback, painted around 4,000 years ago - one of the earliest known depictions of a mounted hunter.

Leaping antelopes, prancing giraffes and snakes poised to strike are among animals and reptiles depicted with astonishing clarity. Such is the quality of the paintings that at least 10 sites, scattered across semi-desert terrain, are likely to be given World Heritage status.

Greek archaeologists on Thursday announced the discovery of 37 ancient tombs dating back to the iron age in a cemetery near the ancient Macedonian capital of Pellas.

Discoveries at the site included a bronze helmet with a gold mouthplate, with weapons and jewellery, in the tomb of a warrior from the 6th century BC.

A total of 37 new tombs were discovered during excavation work this year, adding to more than 1,000 tombs since work began in 2000, researchers said.

The tombs date from 650-280 BC, covering the iron age up to the Hellenistic period (323-146 BC).

The tombs contain iron swords, spears and daggers, plus vases, pottery and jewellery made of gold, silver and iron.

Sydney - An Australian study has uncovered signs that the country's ancient Aborigines may have been the world's first stargazers, pre-dating Stonehenge and Egypt's pyramids by thousands of years.

Professor Ray Norris said widespread and detailed knowledge of the stars had been passed down through the generations by Aborigines, whose history dates back tens of millennia, in traditional songs and stories.

"We know there's lots of stories about the sky: songs, legends, myths," said Norris, an astronomer for Australia's science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO).

"We wondered how much further does it go than that. It turns out also people used the sky for navigation, time-keeping, to mark out the seasons, so it's very practical.

"People were nomadic so when Pleiades (the Seven Sisters star cluster) was up they would move to where the nuts and berries are. Another sign and it would be time to move to the rivers to fish for barramundi, and so on."

Norris, who has studied Aboriginal culture and historical accounts by white settlers, and made several trips to Arnhem Land in Australia's remote Outback, said his research also revealed more detailed astronomical thought.

Models show a 90 percent reduction of the magnitude of climate change

Researchers at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology are looking to optimize climate change reduction by injecting sulfates into the stratosphere. George Ban-Weiss, lead author of the study, along with his team of Carnegie scientists, have studied how the injection of aerosols of sulfate into the stratosphere will affect Earth's chemistry and climate, and which aerosol distribution pattern will bring them closest to their climate goals.

To do this, Ban-Weiss and his team used a global climate model with different sulfate aerosol concentrations depending on latitude to run five simulations. They then determined what distribution of sulfates would bring them closest to climate goals by using the results from the simulations in an optimization model. These distributions were then tested in the global climate model to see how close they came to these goals.

Water is critical to human life, but also plays an important role in the life of stars and their planetary systems. As a gas, water helps to cool collapsing clouds of interstellar material so that they can form new stars.

In the form of ice, water acts as a glue on dust grains to help them coagulate into planetesimals and then into planets around the new stars. Finally, liquid water transports molecules on planetary surfaces, helping bring them together for complex chemistry.

Astronomers are actively looking for water in the cosmos, measuring its abundance, temperature and other properties, and trying to understand why it is found in some places but not others. In 1998, a NASA team led by SAO astronomers launched a space mission to study water in space, the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS).

SWAS found water nearly everywhere it looked, but also found a puzzle: there was less of it (in relation to other molecules) than had been expected. One proposed solution was that considerable amounts of water are frozen out onto the surfaces of cold grains of dust.

Beyond Neptune's orbit, roughly five billion miles from the sun, the solar system can seem like a dark, desolate place.

But like the murky depths of the ocean, the darkness hides millions of mysterious bodies - or at least, so we think.

Known collectively as trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, the first of this population to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. Since then we've found a thousand or so objects in Pluto's domain. Some have even been given exotic names, such as Chaos, Ixion, Quaoar, and Rhadamanthus.

So far, two probes have ventured that deep into the solar system (that'd be Voyager 1 and 2) but neither one paid much heed to TNOs on their way farther afield.

That means astronomers using Earthly telescopes can only guess at how many bodies are out there, what they look like, and what they're made of.

A "cannibal" star suspected of eating its neighbour has been found by NASA.

The billion-year-old red giant, called BP Piscium, is thought to have gobbled up a young star whose remnants are still visible.

BP Piscium is a more evolved version of our Sun located 1,000 light-years away in the constellation of Pisces. It has been found with the help of NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory.

Scientists begun studying it 15 years ago and were bemused by its unusual appearance.

It is orbited by a disc of dusty matter that usually betokens planets beginning to form around young stars.

But young stars are born in clusters and BP Piscium is isolated, leading astronomers to believe that it is in fact a red giant - a star in a late stage of evolution.