Based on the extent to which uranium-238 and uranium-235 isotopes had decayed into their daughter isotopes lead-207 and lead-206, they say the solar system is 4.5682 billion years old. That's between 0.3 and 1.9 million years older than previous estimates, which relied mainly on the Allende meteorite that fell in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1969.

Astronomers have found the most distant galaxy cluster ever seen: the sexily-named SXDF-XCLJ0218-0510.

In the case of this newly found cluster, the light we see left it 9.6 billion years ago - making it 400 million light years farther away than the next-most distant cluster ever seen. The Universe itself is only 13.7 billion years old, so we're seeing this structure as it was not too long after it formed.

In a series for the Discovery Channel the renowned astrophysicist said it was "perfectly rational" to assume intelligent life exists elsewhere.

"If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans," he said.

He explained: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

The US space agency (Nasa) plans just four further shuttle missions after this one - and all of them are planned to launch in daylight hours.

Endeavour's mission is an important moment for the European Space Agency's (Esa) contribution to the station project. Both the new modules were manufactured in Italy by Thales Alenia Space.

NASA says it successfully launched a rocket in Virginia as part of an experiment, and the blast may have caused dozens of people to report seeing strange lights in the sky.

About the time of the launch, dozens of people in the Northeast started calling local television stations to report seeing strange lights.

The Planck space telescope has begun to collect light left over from the Big Bang explosion that created our universe.

If all goes as planned, these observations will be the first of 15 or more months of data gathered from two full-sky scans. Science results are expected in about three years.

NASA reported 11 lightning strikes during the storms that have plagued the Florida coast for weeks. None of the strikes hit the shuttle or its external tank and solid rocket boosters, but there were strikes to the lightning mast and water tower. Two of the strikes were strong enough to trigger an evaluation by NASA engineers.

The Endeavour's original launch date was June 13, but it was canceled 5 hours before launch due to a potentially dangerous vent line hydrogen gas leak. NASA tried again on June 17 but called the mission when the hydrogen leak reappeared.

What would you be prepared to do for money? For $6,500 (£4,500) a month, to be precise?

How about the following: locking yourself inside a small metal container for three months without any communication with the outside world, with electronic monitors attached to various parts of your body and with frozen baby food and cereal bars for breakfast, lunch and dinner?

The six volunteers from Russia, France and Germany believe they are playing a small part in the making of history by bringing the long-cherished goal of a manned mission to the planet Mars one step closer.

A Chinese lunar probe has crashed into the moon in what Beijing has called a controlled collision.

China's ever-more ambitious space programme includes plans for a space station and landing a man on the moon.

Chang'e 1 was under the remote control of two stations in Qingda, eastern China, and Kashgar in the north-west of the country, the Xinhua news agency said.

There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy, a US conference has heard.

"Not only are they probably habitable but they probably are also going to be inhabited," Dr Boss told BBC News. "But I think that most likely the nearby 'Earths' are going to be inhabited with things which are perhaps more common to what Earth was like three or four billion years ago." That means bacterial lifeforms.

Recent work at Edinburgh University tried to quantify how many intelligent civilisations might be out there. The research suggested there could be thousands of them.