There has been a lot of cool and very exciting astronomy news lately that I want to share with you in one big gulp.

First up is news about a new massive object discovered at the edge of the solar system. True to astronomers' tradition of coming up with cuddly names, the object is called 2006 SQ372. It's just over two billion miles from Earth in the inner Oort Cloud, putting it a touch closer to us than the planet Neptune. More details from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and for the geeks, from NASA

Space Ropes: A paper published in the journal Nature introduces a theory about how the filaments seen in the galaxy NGC 1275 (image above) are stablized. NGC 1275 is one of the closest giant elliptical galaxies and lies at the centre of the Perseus Cluster of galaxies. It is an active galaxy, hosting a supermassive black hole at its core, which blows bubbles of radio-wave emitting material into the surrounding cluster gas. Its most spectacular feature is the lacy filigree of gaseous filaments reaching out beyond the galaxy into the multi-million degree X-ray emitting gas that fills the cluster.

Astronomers have long failed to understand how the delicate structures withstood the hostile high-energy environment of the galaxy cluster for more than 100 million years. They should have heated up, dispersed, and evaporated over a very short period of time, or collapsed under their own gravity to form stars. Even more puzzling is the fact that they haven't been ripped apart by the strong tidal pull of gravity in the cluster's core. The new study proposes that magnetic fields hold the charged gas in place and resist forces that would distort the filaments. This skeletal structure has been able to contain and suspend these peculiarly long threads for over 100 million years!

Our first video is from NASA about a new camera going into the Hubble Telescope when the fourth servicing mission launches.

Next up is another cool video about every-day life on the space station:

Finally, sunrise on Mars:

Credits: Large Magellanic Cloud: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Martian sunrise: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University. NGC 1275: NASA, ESA and Andy Fabian (University of Cambridge, UK).