Here's news about the most famous stellar nursery of all, the Orion Nebula. Previously, the distance to the Orion Nebula was estimated at about 1,500 or 1,600 light-years. But the Orion Nebula is actually closer than that by about 200 light-years, according to Rob Jeffries at Keele University in England.

... but that liquid isn't water. The lakes can't hold water because Titan is so far from the sun that any water on its surface would be solid ice. Instead of having liquid water, Titan's lakes are thought to be filled with methane in a liquid form.

Wolf 359 is one of the closest stars to Earth at only 7.8 light-years away. It is a red dwarf star, known to be a single star. Former studies of bright, easy-to-see stars indicated that most of them lie in multiple systems of two or three stars. But those earlier studies neglected small, faint stars like Wolf 359.

Most stars reside in a galaxy. In 2006, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to study over 5,000 stars found in the space between galaxies in the Virgo cluster. The lack of iron in these stars indicated that they may have come from small galaxies that got ripped apart when they passed too close to larger galaxies.

Older dwarf stars, such as Proxima Centauri, have fewer flares and starspots (the stellar equivalent of sunspots). Read more about older dwarf stars here.

The astronomers who accomplished this research likened the effect to being able to look at the quasars under a microscope.

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.