Penn State astronomers using the world's largest radio telescope, at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, have discovered flaring radio emissions from an ultra-cool star, shattering the previous record for the lowest stellar temperature at which radio waves were detected and possibly boosting the odds of discovering life elsewhere in the universe.

A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other space instruments has discovered that a collection of small, ancient galaxies, called the Hickson Compact Group 31 (HCG 31), finally is coming together into one larger galaxy after 10 billion years. The images the team recorded offer a window into the universe's early years, when the buildup of large galaxies from smaller building blocks was common.

The early universe, astronomers tell us, was a very smooth place, its matter and energy spread out uniformly like a pea-soup fog. Nowadays, it contains both airy voids and huge, dense structures: galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, and clusters upon clusters ad infinitum.

How did all this variety take shape?