ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

New images have revealed detailed clues about how the first stars and structures were formed in the Universe and suggest the formation of the Galaxy got off to a fitful start.

A team has discovered evidence of a giant impact in the nearby HD 17255 star system, in which an Earth-sized terrestrial planet and a smaller impactor likely collided at least 200,000 years ago, stripping off part of one planet's atmosphere.

Researchers have long suspected a connection between information and the physical universe, with various paradoxes and thought experiments used to explore how or why information could be encoded in physical matter. A researcher attempts to shed light on exactly how much of this information is out there and presents a numerical estimate for the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe -- approximately 6 times 10 to the power of 80 bits of information.