Planck first light yields promising results
Preliminary results from the Planck First Light Survey, performed to demonstrate the stability of the instruments and the ability to calibrate them over long periods, indicate that the data quality is excellent. This bodes well for the full sky survey that has just begun.

Rebirth of an icon: Hubble's first images since Servicing Mission 4 [heic0910]
Astronomers today declared the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope a fully rejuvenated observatory ready for a new decade of exploration, with the release of observations from four of its six operating science instruments.

Smallest exoplanet is shown to be a solid, rocky world
The confirmation of the nature of CoRoT-7b as the first rocky planet outside our Solar System marks a significant step forward in the search for Earth-like exoplanets. The detection by CoRoT and follow-up radial velocity measurements with HARPS suggest that this exoplanet, CoRoT-7b, has a density similar to that of Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth making it only the fifth known terrestrial planet in the Universe.