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Astronomers have found the largest known solar system at a distance of one trillion kilometers. A report released from the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society has disclosed that a planet known as 2MASS J2126-8140, which is 12 to 15 times heavier as compared to the mass of Jupiter, is present in another solar system. It is three times bigger than the last star-planet pair discovered.

The gigantic planet completes its orbit around its star in nearly a million years. It is 140 times wider in comparison to Pluto's course around the sun.

Google made an announcement on Wednesday saying that a program created by its DeepMind artificial intelligence lab AlphaGo had beaten the European Go champion by 5-0, without a handicap, in a five-game match past October.

The upcoming test is going to be held in March, in which AlphaGo will challenge the world champion, Lee Sedol, during a five-game match in Seoul. Legendary game master Lee is by consensus the best player of modern times. It is going to be the Go equivalent of the prominent chess match that took place between IBM’s Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov in 1996.

The news came out in a Google article appeared in the journal Nature, this week with a title, ‘Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search’.

In case there comes a day when scientists find life on the Red Planet, they might just want to be thankful to a small fungi discovered on Antarctic rocks.

The cryptoendolithic fungi are usually located in the McMurdo Dry Valleys in the Antarctic Victoria Land, but they were lately sent to the International Space Station by European researchers. When it stayed on board in conditions alike those on Mars for 18 months, the researchers discovered that most of them survived.

Tracking the comings and goings of a planet was a matter of space research more than a thousand year ago before first telescopes were discovered. That time, simple arithmetic was a way to track motion of a planet across the night sky.

A new study on ancient clay tablets revealed that the Babylonia astronomers used geometry to track the planet Jupiter, or what they called ‘the White Star’ at least 1,400 years before Europeans. They were the first to calculate the gas giant’s orbit, it added.

According to Hubble Space Telescope astronomers, the popular old saying that ‘what goes up must come down’ is even applicable on a huge cloud of hydrogen gas beyond our Milky Way galaxy. The invisible cloud is falling in the direction of our galaxy at roughly 700,000 miles per hour.

There are a large number of huge, high-velocity gas clouds speeding around the outskirts of our galaxy, but the so-called ‘Smith Cloud’ is different as its trajectory is well known. New Hubble observations have suggested that it was launched from the galactic disk’s out regions, nearly 70 million years back. The cloud was found in the early 1960s by doctoral astronomy student Gail Smith, who spotted the radio waves emission form its hydrogen.

Octopuses have the ability to turn their colour into black whenever they are intimidated by their neighbors. They not only turn black, but also stand tall and loom over their rivals threateningly, giving them the image of an eight-armed Dracula.

The finding, published as part of a study in the journal Current Biology, shows that some of the octopuses have a social life. It also busts the existing belief in the scientific community that the invertebrates are loners.

The study focuses on a species called octopus tetricus or the gloomy octopus, which was found in the shallows of Jervis Bay, Australia. Probably, the octopuses had gathered at the site to munch on tasty scallops.