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12 August 2009: While far from a tropical rain forest, the equatorial region of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, has recently displayed tantalizing evidence that the parched, dry, ultra-frigid desert can support large-scale storms.

5 August 2009: Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour (about 1.6 million kilometers per hour), about twice the speed of our Sun through the Milky Way.

30 April 2009: The Gemini Observatory has released the first color image of what astronomers are calling the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object is what is known as a Gamma-ray burst (GRB) which are the most energetic single events known in the universe.

4 March 2009: Finding a needle in a haystack might be easy compared to finding two very similar black holes closely orbiting each other in a distant galaxy.

9 November 2008: Astronomers using the Gemini and Keck observatories obtain first direct images of a planetary family around a normal star

14 September 2008: Astronomers have unveiled what is likely the first picture of a planet around a normal star similar to the Sun.

10 September 2008: Astronomers have been puzzling over the engine behind the historical 1843 outburst of Eta Carinae since it happened, but new observations with the Gemini South and the Blanco telescopes in Chile add a startling new clue.

21 May 2008: Astronomers have observed the aftermath of spectacular stellar explosions known as supernovae before, but until now no one has witnessed a star dying in real time. While observing supernova 2007uy with the Swift X-ray Telescope, Alicia Soderberg and Edo Berger (Princeton University) discovered a mysterious X-ray flash elsewhere in the galaxy NGC 2770 located about 90 million light years away (Figure 1). Within a few hours observatories around the world scrambled to study its light. In a rapid sequence of events the Gemini North telescope was able to capture and dissect the object’s light in a set of optical spectra that contains the earliest spectrum ever obtained of a massive star ending its life in a supernova explosion outside of our galaxy’s neighborhood.

2 April 2008: The well-known naked-eye star cluster Omega Centauri may be home to an elusive intermediate-mass black hole. Observations made using Gemini Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope provide convincing evidence that such black holes do exist and could even lead to an understanding of how they might evolve into larger supermassive black holes like the ones found at the cores of many galaxies.

9 January 2008: Observations of the interacting binary star using telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory and NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that the disks of hot gas that accumulate around a wide variety of astronomical objects—from degenerate stars in energetic binary systems to supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies—are likely to be much larger than previously believed.

8 January 2008: The Gemini South Multi-Object Spectograph (GMOS) recently captured a dramatic image of a vast cloud complex named DEM L316 located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. The peanut-shaped nebula appears to be a single object, but the latest research indicates that it is really comprised of two distinct gas and dust clouds formed by different types of supernova explosions.

28 November 2007: A dwarf star with a surprisingly magnetic personality and a huge hot spot covering half its surface area is showing astronomers that life as a cool dwarf is not necessarily as simple and quiet as they once assumed.

14 November 2007: Astronomers have found evidence for the formation of young rocky planets around the star HD 23514 located in the well-known Pleiades (Seven Sisters) star cluster that is easily visible in the current evening sky.

17 July 2007: Frigid geysers spewing material up through cracks in the crust of Pluto’s companion Charon and recoating parts of its surface in ice crystals could be making this distant world into the equivalent of an outer solar system ice machine.

30 May 2007: The coolest-known star-like object beyond the solar system is giving astronomers a new look at the differences between massive planets and the smallest brown dwarfs. This newly discovered object, called ULAS J0034-00 and located in the constellation Cetus, has a record-setting surface temperature of 600-700 K, cooler than any known solitary brown dwarf. In addition, it’s a relative lightweight, with an estimated mass of only 15-30 times that of Jupiter (although they both have about the same diameter).

28 May 2007: The GLOBE at Night 2007 citizen-science campaign generated nearly double the number of measurements of the world’s dark (and not so dark) skies compared to its first year. The program also successfully demonstrated a prototype digital data-collection effort that aims to grow to a global scale by 2009 during the International Year of Astronomy.

4 April 2007: Astronomers have serendipitously discovered a record-breaking pair of low-mass objects with an extreme orbital separation. The petite objects, each of which has a mass less than 100 times that of Jupiter and could be either stars or brown dwarfs, are separated by more than 5,000 times the distance between the Sun and Earth – a value that breaks the previous record by a factor of three and leaves the duration of their future together uncertain.

8 January 2007: Astronomers have announced the discovery of huge quantities of an unusual variety of oxygen in two very rare types of stars. The finding suggests that the origin of these oddball stars may lie in the physics behind the mergers of white dwarf star pairs.

8 January 2007: Fundamental to theories describing active galactic nuclei (AGN) is the prediction that a doughnut-shaped ring of material (a torus) surrounds a supermassive black hole in these energetic galactic cores. Yet, understanding an AGN's torus, or indeed seeing one directly, has proved to be extremely frustrating, and has spurred an ongoing debate about their extent and physical properties.

7 January 2007: Astronomers studying highly energetic binary stars called polars have obtained the first observational evidence that the intense magnetic fields produced by the white dwarf half of the interacting pair can induce flares, sunspots and other explosive activity in its otherwise low-wattage, low-mass partner.