The breakthrough was announced late Tuesday at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting. Another, more poignant revelation for stargazers was one California team's discovery of a new nighttime object: Large, failed stars, fading away like dying embers. The faint balls of gas require a whole new name -- "L" dwarfs -- because they're by far the most common objects in the Milky Way. In other words, for every bright shining sun out there, there are dozens of dark failures -- which is another good reason for us yellow-dwarf success stories to be grateful.
What Becomes a Star
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SAN DIEGO: Not only is the universe 25 percent bigger today, but there's a new kind of star in it. For the first time, astronomers have seen through the ominously named Zone of Avoidance -- a cloud of dust smack-dab in the center of the Milky Way that blocked Earth's view of around a quarter of space. Zeroing in with radio telescopes on signals from hydrogen atoms, a University of New Mexico team managed to dig out some amazing interstellar booty behind the seemingly impenetrable dust cloud. Their haul so far? More than a hundred newly discovered galaxies -- and the team expects to spot more than 2,000 more before the century is out.