In 2006, astronomers detected 'vampire stars' in a star cluster called 47 Tucanae. The cluster is thought to have formed 12 billion years ago. But some stars in 47 Tucanae appear only 1 to 2 billion years old. Elena Sabbi of the Space Telescope Science Institute thinks these stars really are old, but appear young because they've been munching on neighboring stars.

Double centaurs are a centaur plus a compaion. Centaurs are icy planetoids orbiting the sun between the outer planets Jupiter and Neptune. Read more.

Astronomers studied a pair of brown dwarfs in the direction of the Orion Nebula to learn fundamental properties of eclipsing brown dwarfs.

Located two billion light-years away, Abell 2218 is an example of a huge galaxy cluster that can bend light, thereby acting as a 'telescope' for astronomers. It works because the gravity of a large mass in space - like a galaxy cluster - bends and focuses the light from galaxies that lie behind it.

There are billions of stars in our Milky Way galaxy - the stars we see at night when we look in a clear dark sky. To our eyes, these stars look as if they're standing still. But they're really moving. One of the nearest 45 stars, called Kapteyn's star, is an example of a high-velocity stars moving in the space near our sun.

Astronomers discover what might become the smallest solar system yet known. Read more about this tiny solar-system-to-be here with Kevin Luhman.

Dusty disks around young stars in infrared images provide a way to directly study these star-forming disks. Read more about how astronomers are studying them.

On July 2, 2006, asteroid 2004 XP14 passed not much farther than the moon's average distance from Earth. There is no danger of this asteroid striking Earth in the foreseeable future. But astronomers - like Judit Ries of the University of Texas - now know and study hundreds of other Near-Earth Objects like 2004 XP14.