Though Mercury is generally thought of as an inhospitable, flaming ball of rock due to its close distance to the sun, its poles are permanently cast in shadow. In the past, work has shown that areas near Mercury’s poles reflect radar, which is something ice does. Now, it turns out, the Messenger probe has found that the radar patches near the shadowy poles actually line up with craters that are covered in shadow, which would make a perfect home for water-ice.

After performing MRI scans on 27 astronauts after they spent an average of 108 days in space, Larry Kramer of Texas Medical School in Houston and his colleagues found that around half of the astronauts now had eye problems. Six of the astronauts had flattening of the eyeball, four had bulging of the optic nerve, and three had kinks in the nerve sheath. The eye found in the astronauts are normally found in people with idiopathic intracranial hypertension, a condition where the brain experiences high pressure from blood and other fluids. These symptoms are thought to be caused in space due to the living in free-fall, where the blood pools towards the skull instead of toward the legs like it would when living in regular gravity.

A recent survey uncovered a startling number of so-called “nomad planets,” planets that don’t orbit a star. The number of these wandering worlds suggested to researchers that they might, in fact, be more plentiful than stars. Now, a new study sought to find the upper limit to the number of nomad planets that could exist in our galaxy. They’ve pegged their figures to be no more than 100,000 nomad planets for each star.

An international team of scientists has discovered a new super-Earth orbiting a star only 22 light years away. The orbiting planet has a an orbital period of around 28 days and a minimum mass 4.5 times the size of Earth. Most excitingly, the planet orbits its star within a zone where temperatures are within the right range for water too exist, neither too hot nor too cold, otherwise known as the habitable zone.

NASA’s GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory), which we’ve been following, has provided its first video of the far side of the moon. You know, the part we can’t normally see and Hollywood blockbusters like to sling spaceships around when they need a boost. This isn’t the first video of that side of the moon, but GRAIL’s first, so keep in mind you’re not witnessing impressive history, but you’re witnessing something pretty cool in its own right regardless. The video, taken with the GRAIL’s MoonKAM, shows the North Pole to the South Pole, and shows us that all of the secret alien bases hidden on the other side of the moon aren’t there, or at the very least, packed up and went below the moon’s surface until the MoonKAM stopped trying to record them.

Recently, planetary scientists at University of California, Berkeley, Hugh Wilson and Burkhard Militzer, performed an experiment wherein they dipped the material that helps make up Jupiter’s core, magnesium oxide, into a hydrogen-helium fluid, which is at the heart of the planet. It turns out the magnesium oxide actually has a high solubility, which means Jupiter’s rock could very well be liquifying, shrinking over time, which in turn suggests that Jupiter was even bigger at one point in time than it is now.

NASA’s Kepler has found the first earth-sized planets orbiting a star outside of our solar system. Unfortunately for extraterrestrial life enthusiasts, the planets are too close to the star, so they are not in the star’s habitable zone. Dubbed Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, the planets are in located a distance from the star that liquid water could not exist on their respective surfaces, however, the planets set a record for being the smallest exoplanets found orbiting a star similar to our sun.

Using data from NASA’s Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, and international team of astronomers has identified what could be the smallest known black hole. The astronomers found what is considered a black hole “heartbeat,” a type pf X-ray pattern, named as such due to its resemblance to an electrocardiogram. The binary system where the black hole was found, named IGR J17091-3624, consists of a normal star and a black hole that weighs less than three times the mass of our sun, which just so happens to be near what is thought to be the boundary where black holes are even possible.

The events surrounding the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission are fairly well known: While en-route to the moon, an explosion crippled the command module leading to a tense 4-day journey back to Earth. While the world watched, mission commander James Lovell was frantically scribbling on this Lunar Module Systems Activation Checklist Book just two hours after the explosion. It was sold this week at auction to an anonymous collector by Heritage Auctions for the tune of $388,375. Of course, to Lovell and the rest of his crew, this slim book was surely priceless.

Astronomers have discovered a strange new “species,” so to speak, of galaxy. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA astronomers discovered four of these ultra-red galaxies. Though they are able to describe the members of this type of galaxy, they are unable to explain what makes them so red in color.