Well, this is pretty damn exciting: astronomers have confirmed the detection of a planet just 1.13 times the size of Earth orbiting around Alpha Centauri B, which is part of the closest star system to Earth. At just 4.3 light-years away, it's potentially reachable in just a few decades with near-term technology, and now we've got a place to land. Er, sort of.

Designing and building a new space telescope takes such a long time that even before Hubble 2.0 (the James Webb Space Telescope) has launched, astronomers are already working on Hubble 3.0, known right now as ATLAST.

Space. It's big, and it's deep, but as far as we humans here on Earth are concerned, it may as well be a perfectly flat picture painted up there across the sky. It's hard to get much in the way of depth through a telescope, but with a little bit of creativity and artistic license, it's possible to 3D-ify some truly beautiful nebulae.

One billion years is a span of time that's almost impossible for humans to conceive of: our civilization is only a few thousand years old, and we'll be lucky if we see another few thousand into the future. With that in mind, a team of artists is sending a special time capsule into space, where it should last until the sun eats it.