2014 Update

Welcome to our 2014 update. It was a very interesting year of discoveries.

The most fascinating news came close to home with the landing of a spacecraft on a comet. Because we never really covered comets and the Oort cloud in our segment on the Solar System, we’ll cover them here.

We’ll update to two stories we’ve been following. One is the G2 gas cloud that survive its passage close to Sag A*, our galaxy’s supermassive black hole – something that’s not possible for a gas cloud. The other is the Gaia project. It has transitioned into its operational life mapping a billion Milky Way stars. We’ll take a look at how it sees the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

Next, we’ll cover some Milky Way objects such as the Monkey Head Nebula, and a very interesting multiple star system called XZ Tauri. In the Local Group, we find a theory breaking discovery about globular star clusters. We also have news on an ultra-compact dwarf galaxy with an unexpected black hole; a galaxy halo that is unexpectedly large; and a new look at the Ultra Deep Field.

We’ll begin with comets.