British astronomers have said they have found the heaviest and brightest star known to exist. It is 300 times as big as our own Sun. R136a1, in the Tarantula Nebula of the Large Magellanic Cloud, is more than 165,000 light years away. Super heavyweight stars that form in clusers are rare and has been impossible to distinguish between other objects. These types of stars loose weight as they age.

Within the star cluster, the scientists estimate that only four stars weigh more than 150 times the mass of the Sun but even though there are over 100,000 stars within the cluster, with the four heaviest objects accounting for nearly half of all the solar wind and radiation emitted from the cluster.

The new findings support the idea that there are lower size limits for stars.

The Qinetiq company, from the UK, that developed the Zephyr unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) made history after becoming the first aircraft to stay afloat for 336 hours and 24 minutes. The Zephyr is a solar aircraft that stayed in the sky during a non-stop flight above the U.S. Army range in Arizona before being ordered to land.

At 60,000 ft., the aircraft endured coious amount sof solar energy to charge its lithium-sulphur batteries and to keep its two propellers going. Though the plane lost altitude during the night, the energy stories in its batteries maintained flight. Qinetiq is now looking to the Ministry of Defense and the DoD (US Department of Defense) to put the plane into service, as its no longer experimental.

A group of investigators from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), which is based in Germany, have determined that Neptune was likely hit by a comet more than 200 years ago by using the Herschel Space Observatory.

The observatory was launched with the Planck Telescope aboard an Ariane 5 heavy-lift delivery system. Using the three sensitive scientific instruments aboard Herschel, experts learned that a peculiar distribution of carbon monoxide exists on Neptune, which is the main evidence that points to a comet collision. The three detectors aboard the telescope are PACS (the Photodetecting Array Camera and Spectrometer), SPIRE (the Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver), and HIFI (the Heterodyne Instrument for the Far Infrared).

The space agency made it official Thursday after weeks of hints of launch delays. Managers agreed to postpone the next-to-last shuttle launch until Nov. 1. Discovery had been scheduled to fly to the International Space Station in September.

The very last mission now has a Feb. 26 launch date. Endeavour will close out the shuttle program by delivering a major scientific instrument to the space station. NASA has said that it will decide in August to make more shuttle launch decisions.