One of the more recent discoveries in astronomy lately is a very 'cool' one. A Brown Dwarf in a binary system has the temperature just around that of a cup of coffee.

The internet provides different information for different audiences of this discovery. Here are the two links:
This is the news report of the discovery.
This is a scholarly report of the discovery.

Each site provides different context of information for a different reader. The news report cites the most basic information about the star. The primary focus of the article is the fact that the star is so low in temperature and it goes to show that the article is more of an attention getter than a hub of valuable information. It only provides enough information to make sense in the context of the subject as well as information that an audience of common astronomy knowledge can understand. It is also this audience that would only be interested in astronomy news that they could either understand the scope of or the scientific importance of the discovery or event.

The other site is a scholarly report of the discovery. The report is filled with astronomer jargon that would be useless to the news article because this is also useless information to that audience. This article would really only be used to scholars in the field. When compared to any other analysis of a celestial object, it is not immediately recognizable as anything special. As a scholarly report, it also does not have any entertainment value. Its only purpose is to inform provide information to someone who could actually make use of it.

For the first time, we have a satellite orbiting Mercury.

The craft will be measuring the planet's for gravitational fields to determine the size of the core. Scientists are also hoping to create a high definition map of the planet, as well as search for frozen water.

here's the link

Observable Dark Matter

Here's an interesting article on dark matter research.

Researchers have a dark matter detector with which they can actually observe the mysterious 'stuff'' that is dark matter.

Researchers have a collection of xenon atoms. The xenon reacts when dark matter particles referred to as 'WIMPs' collide with the xenon particles.

You can get more details here.

Dark matter has made a name for itself in astronomy research. If you didn't know what it is, this video explains just about everything.

This video is several years old, so there may have been some new discoveries in dark matter since then. I'll try to find that information for a future post.