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12 Noviembre 2003: The naked-eye Pleiades star cluster has long been known to professional and amateur astronomers for the striking visible nebulosity that envelopes the cluster’s brightest stars, scattering their light like fog around a streetlamp.

16 Septiembre 2003: Case Western Reserve University astronomers have announced the discovery of a new galaxy, termed Andromeda VIII. The new galaxy is so widespread and transparent that astronomers did not suspect its existence until they mapped the velocity of stars thought to belong to the well-known and nearby large Andromeda spiral galaxy and found them to move independently of Andromeda.

6 Agosto 2003: Astronomers have finally identified the progenitor star system of a Type Ia supernova. The culprit that triggered the stellar explosion is a surprisingly normal star just a few times more massive than the Sun.

9 Julio 2003: Astronomers have assembled the first effective model for both the shape and evolutionary history of the Owl Nebula, the well-known planetary nebula in the constellation Ursa Major.

26 Mayo 2003: An international team of astronomers has discovered seven extremely large circumstellar disks silhouetted against the forming stars that they surround. These new disks are 10 to 100 times larger than both our solar system and other planet-forming disks that have been imaged previously, suggesting that it may be possible for planets to form at much larger distances from their stars than previously thought.

5 Marzo 2003: A team of astronomers headed by Frank Winkler of Middlebury College has combined precise digital observations with simple mathematics to estimate the apparent brightness of an exploding star whose light reached Earth nearly a thousand years ago, when it produced a display that was probably the brightest stellar event witnessed in recorded human history.

13 Enero 2003: A team of astronomers led by Matthew Holman (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and JJ Kavelaars (National Research Council of Canada) has discovered three previously unknown moons of Neptune. This boosts the number of known satellites of the gas giant to eleven. These moons are the first to be discovered orbiting Neptune since the Voyager II flyby in 1989, and the first discovered from a ground-based telescope since 1949.

8 Enero 2003: Astronomers have discovered a small body orbiting the Sun at the distance of Neptune whose orbit makes it the first known member of a long-sought population of objects known as Neptune Trojans.

8 Enero 2003: Astronomers have discovered dozens of potential stellar cocoons within the hostile environment of the Carina Nebula, including some oddballs with bulbous heads, irregular shapes and long, thin tails. Each of these objects may harbor disks of gas and dust that could one day form planetary systems.

15 Octubre 2002: An unobtrusive arc of blue stars stretching above the iconic galaxy Centaurus A represents the lingering signature of an episode of galactic cannibalism that is surprisingly recent and, astronomically speaking, quite nearby.

6 Septiembre 2002: Direct measurements of the surface properties and interior structures of asteroids and comets should be fundamental elements of future spacecraft missions to these primitive solar system bodies, according to participants in a scientific workshop held in Arlington, VA, from September 3-6.

21 Agosto 2002: Students from Yale University used the WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory to capture a series of still images of asteroid 2002 NY40 on August 15-16, two nights before its close flyby of Earth.

3 Junio 2002: Aided by the distorted shape of the stars in normally faint binary systems called Soft X-ray Transients, an astronomer at the University of California-San Diego has determined that two nearby black holes each have a mass no larger than a handful of stars like our Sun.

3 Junio 2002: New observations of the richly populated star cluster NGC 2420 taken by the refurbished WIYN 0.9-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory suggest that the cluster contains a multitude of clues about the history and evolution of the Milky Way.

21 Mayo 2002: Astronomers using adaptive optics technology on the Gemini North Telescope have observed a brown dwarf orbiting a low-mass star at a distance comparable to just three times the distance between the Earth and Sun. This is the closest separation distance ever found for this type of binary system using direct imaging.

25 Febrero 2002: A Canadian-led research team using the Gemini Observatory has released tantalizing evidence that tiny dust particles ejected by hot, massive stars, may survive long enough to reach the interstellar medium. This kind of process might have provided some of the materials necessary for the early formation of planetary systems in the young Universe.

7 Enero 2002: Astronomers using adaptive optics on the Gemini North and Keck telescopes have taken an image of a brown dwarf orbiting a nearby star similar to the Sun. The faint companion is separated from its parent star by less than the distance between the Sun and the planet Uranus and is the smallest separation brown dwarf companion seen with direct imaging.

7 Enero 2002: Astronomers using the recently commissioned Gemini North telescope in Hawaii have discovered a protoplanetary disk orbiting one of the stars in a newborn quadruple star system. The dusty disk, about three times the size of Pluto's orbit around the Sun, appears nearly edge-on when viewed from Earth.

29 Octubre 2001: In the deepest ground-based mid-infrared image ever, the Gemini North Telescope reveals that the mysterious environment around one of the most massive black holes in the Universe is missing a key feature predicted by astronomical theory.

28 Agosto 2001: Astronomers have discovered a double star system, known as a massive X-ray binary, with an orbit so elongated that the twosome appears to have barely survived the disruptive effects of the supernova that transformed them into a fountain of X-ray energy.