On the radar

All the news from the world of science

Hubble finds ‘star factory’

NASA's HubbleSpace Telescope has shed new light on a frog-shaped blob of gas in space (above), which appears to contain a star factory. Called Hanny's Voorwerp, the blob was discovered in 2007 by Dutch schoolteacher Hanny van Arkel. Hubble's cameras have found that a region around 650 million light-years away from Earth appears to be forging stars.

"The star clusters are localized, confined to an area that is over a few thousand light-years wide," explained astronomer William Keel of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, leader of the Hubblestudy. "The region may have been churning out stars for several million years. They are so dim that they have previously been lost in the brilliant light of the surrounding gas."

Reptile that ruled the skies

Evidence has turned up of a new species of flying reptile that most likely patrolled the skies around 70 million years ago. The discovery was made in a fossil cabinet at the University of Alberta in Canada, where PhD student Victoria Arbour took a while to figure out a curious jawbone fossil that had been found in British Columbia.

Eventually the similarity of its teeth to known pterosaurs, or flying reptiles, led her to conclude this was a previously unknown species.

"They reminded me of piranha teeth, designed for pecking away at meat," said Arbour, whose study is published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. The new addition has been called Gwawinapterus beardiand was most likely a scavenger that lived on leftover kills made by predator dinosaurs.

• "We've pinned down the properties of this planet with such fantastic accuracy that we're able to say without a doubt that this is a rocky world, something that you could actually stand on
  
  Prof Natalie Batalha at a conference in Seattle this week, speaking about the rocky exoplanet Kepler-10b, which is about 1.4 times the size of Earth but would not be habitable due to heat. – BBC