We live in a pretty amazing age, although I suppose people in every age think their own times are amazing. But, I have to count an age where we (humans) can reach out and explore other planets and distant stars and galaxies seemingly as readily as we turn on the computer as amazing.

Going over some recent press releases that have landed in my mailbox, I see a story about water ice on Mars—not a big surprise, we know there’s water on Mars, but now we are getting a better feel for how much and how it is distributed (paricularly as underground ice) on the Red Planet. That one broke earlier today, and you can see the full story and pictures here. Now, you might wonder why this is a Big Deal. I mean, we detect ice on our planet all the time. But, again—astronomers reached out with a specialized camera across from Earth to Mars, and were able to tease out data about underground ice on a planet we haven’t even personally set foot on yet. THAT is amazing.

Also released today from the European office of the Hubble Space Telescope is a great image of the globular cluster NGC 2808. It’s a great picture, very pretty! And, it reveals that (for this globular cluster anyway) star birth is NOT a thing of the past.

Globulars are typically the oldest members of our galaxy’s system, born when the Milky Way was, and astronomers thought all the stars in a globular were the same age. For THIS globular, however, there are three generations of stars, implying that instead of one big burst of stars, it had three baby booms. This upsets the conventional theories about globular cluster formation, and we get another great pic of a globular in the process, using a telescope that reaches out across thousands of light-years to tell us a story about stars as they formed some 12 billion years ago!

Speaking of stellar ages, the folks at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, announced a new method for determining very accurate ages of stars based on how fast they rotate. Why would you want to know how old a star is? If it has planets, knowing its age helps you put a timetable on the planets’ ages and how their evolution is proceeding. That’s a large and very important part in the study of any planets actually—how they change over time. The rotation rate of a star, as it turns out, is a function of its age and color. If you measure the rotation period and the color, for example, you can calculate the age of the star.

Finally, although it’s not entirely new news, the recent announcement that astronomers using the European Southern Observatory have discovered the most Earth-like planet around another star is a new benchmark in planet searches. Stars are large and bright, and their light can hide planets that orbit close by. We usually have to use indirect methods (like taking a spectral measurement of the star’s light and then measuring any “wobbles” in the spectrum that indicate the gravitational tug of a planet on its star) to find exoplanets. Most of the exoplanets you’ve heard about are Jupiter-like (ie. big and gassy) planets. This new one is more Earth-like, and astronomers think that it may have water in its atmosphere. That doesn’t mean it has life, but water is an important factor for the creation of life as we know it. Stay tuned on that one.