NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has trained its sights on a rather puzzling astronomical discovery. Nine young, compact galaxies spanning only 5,000 light-years across were spotted recently. The weird thing about them was that they weigh as much as 200 billion times the mass of our own Sun. Find out more about this in our full article after the jump.

There's a possibility that the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS detector might be able to reveal extra dimensions. But for now the only thing it is able to unveil is the fact that it's facing a lawsuit right now. Fermilab and CERN's project has been put to a halt due to worries and fears by critics. Read more on this in the full article.

In case you are not aware, the Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii had its first eruptive explosion on March 19 since 1924. The explosion took place in the middle of a national park, causing problems never imagined before by the U.S. government. The rest of the details are available after the jump!

It looks like the best chances for the Solar System to produce life other than on the planet Earth isn't on a planet at all, but a moon. What makes it more interesting is that it's not just on any moon, but on Charon, the moon of our very own ex-planet, Pluto.

Scientists down at Hawaii's Gemini Telescope have discovered patches of ice crystals mixed with ammonia hydrates on the surface of Charon. Researchers, ruling out many theories on how the ice got there, concluded that the ice came from inside Charon itself, seeping out of cracks from the surface.

The process is known as cryo-volcanism, where liquid from below erupts to the surface and instantly freezes. Scientists believe that the cryo-volcanism in Charon is the result of a nuclear material inside it, causing the phenomenon. They also believe the ammonia hydrates acts as an antifreeze agent. Jason Cook, who led the research team that studied Charon's surface, explains:

Charon's surface is almost entirely water ice. So it must have a vast amount of water under the surface, and much of that should be frozen as well. Only deep inside Charon could water be a liquid. Yet, there is fresh ice on the surface, meaning that some liquid water must somehow reach the surface. The ammonia sitting on the surface provides the clue. It's the ammonia that helps keep some material liquid. It makes it all feasible. Without ammonia the water could not get out there.

Scientists are now speculating that Charon may hold life in her underbelly, with alien fish swimming its underground waters. The nuclear reactions would make this possible inside Charon, but the surface is a different matter, as it is far too cold (around -230 degrees Celsius.) It's funny to think that Pluto was named after the Roman god of the underworld, and Charon was the ferryman who took the dead to the underworld.

NASA's New Horizons probe, currently on the way to Pluto, will help scientists investigate Charon further when the probe arrives in July, 2015 to take a closer look and find more evidence.

Already nicknamed "Octosquid," this ruby-red creature has the body of a squid but with the eight tentacles of an octopus.

The scientists at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA) caught this foot long enigma of the deep quite accidentally last week from one of their 3,000 foot deep pipelines that sucks up deep-sea water for their lab. It got caught in one of their filter tanks and stayed alive for three days after capture.

Along with the octosquid, three black rattail fish and four jellyfish were captured. All the others were dead except for the smallest rattail fish. It wasn't alive for long though since the octosquid ate it up. Jan War, operations manager of NELHA, said that the fish that come up the pipeline usually die when they get sucked up because of the rapid change in pressure. The octosquid wasn't affected though because invertebrates (creatures without a spine) aren't affected by pressure change.

The folks down at Hawaii are planning on ways to check the filters for their pipelines more often - a process which is usually done years apart - because they keep coming up with rather odd finds. They still have a starfish they don't know the species of and to this day is just labeled "animal." Pipelines that go down at different depths actually come up with different kinds of species. Who knows what else is down there? The depths are by large the biggest container of new and unknown life. Needless to say, the scientists involved are enthusiastic with the prospects.

Countries in the South Pacific are bracing themselves for what could be tail-whips of an underwater earthquake and tsunami that happened a few hours ago killing at least 13 people.

The earthquake hit magnitude 8 on the Richter scale and the epicenter was detected 220 miles off the coast of the Solomons. The death toll registered has not included those missing as the 30-foot wave battered villages along the beach.

Even in the deluge, authorities said that it was fortunate that everything happened in the morning, prompting people to take notice and allowing civil defense measures to be conducted.

Australia is now on full alert and has closed beaches and stopped harbor activities in Sydney. Similar precautionary alerts have also been raised in Hawaii and Japan to safeguard live sand avoid incidents that happened in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

Tsunamis are often triggered by offshore earthquakes. The movement in the ocean floor causes water to be drawn back farther than it usually is along the coast. That creates the artificial and extreme "low tide." The educated know it's time to run when they see a phenomenon like that.

A report by the Associated Press informs that Daniel Dzurisin, a geologist at the US Geological Survey's Cascades Volcano believes that Mount St. Helens may be following the example of Kilauea in Hawaii in that it has become an "open system." Basically this means that magma is being replaced from a reservoir beneath the volcano as fast as it emerges as lava at the surface.

The Geologist notes that this was observed from the domebuilding eruption that started last 2004 and that continues at a relatively unchanged pace.

Analysis of digital elevation models made from high-resolution aerial photographs reveal that, the flow has grown from roughly eight cubic yards, per second, to slightly more than one cubic yard per second. Since last April it has been fairly constant at 0.6 cubic yards per second. They note that this is about equivalent to nine truckloads of lava every two minutes

Dzurisin notes that the longer the eruption continues, the more likely that a direct pathway has developed for molten rock to emerge from the beneath the earth's crust to the planet's surface. Dzurisin does note however, that it will take them another year the reach a more definite conclusion.

The experts say that they know that St. Helens is capable of eruptions that could last for decades. Moreover, one has to note that the ongoing eruption at Kilauea started in 1983. All those "lava flows in our backyard" stories come from Hawaii and Kilauea. Will we be hearing about lava flows in Vancouver in the near future? Time will tell.

Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered a splotch of water the size of the Arctic Ocean hundreds of miles beneath eastern Asia.

The water, accordingly, is locked in moisture-containing rocks 700 to 1,400 kilometers (400 to 800 miles) beneath the surface and was found while scanning seismic waves as they passed through the Earth's interior.

This is remarkable. Normally, our planet's heat bakes the water out of the rocks before it even gets more than 100 kilometers deep (60 miles). But along the eastern Pacific Rim, conditions allow the water to get to deeper location before evaporating.

In this case, the water blob is found from Indonesia to the northern tip of Russia. The head of the research team, Michael Wysession, suggests that this could give a clue as to how volcanic regions like Iceland, Hawaii, and Yellowstone National Park were formed. According to Wysession, the presence of water allow hot spots to melt more rock and create more lava.

Stanford University geophysicist Norman Sleep, likewise, believes that water is gradually being sucked back below the surface because the Earth is aging. This, in the long run, may be a good thing for Earth's geological stability as it helps keep the thickness and elevation of the continents stable.

Californian ferret lovers got together for the "2006 Legalize Ferrets Revival" to convince the state to abolish the law that makes it illegal to own the animals as pets. Ferrets are legal in every state except California and Hawaii because they're non-native species. Environment and wildlife experts say keeping ferrets as pets in California is unwise. If pet ferrets escaped to the wild they could push California's endangered and threatened species over the edge.

But ferret fanciers disagree. "They were misclassified by Fish and Game as a wild animal... there are black-footed ferrets that belong on the prairie and there are domestic ferrets that belong in the living room." According to the group calling all ferrets wild is like saying all dogs are wolves.

A California vet who has treated thousands of pet ferrets agrees and describes domesticated ferrets as "wimps." He says ferrets accidentally left outdoors for more than 48 hours end up in a state of shock or killed by the elements. He noted they're more at home in BarcaLounger than in California's great outdoors.

Ferrets are accident prone and have a way of getting themselves in trouble around the house. They are known to ingest rubber, foam and plastic - all requiring medical attention. They are also susceptible to heart disease and cancer. But they remain popular pets since the 1970s because of their playfulness. "They are eternal kittens," said a ferret owner.

When ferrets (Mustela putorius furo) became domesticated is not known but remains have been dated to 1500 BC. It is believed that the ferret was bred or hybridized from the European Polecat (Mustela putorius) and perhaps from the steppe polecat (Mustela eversmanni).

Their wild cousin, the Black-footed Ferret (Mustela nigripes) is the most endangered mammal in North America, although they are believed to be already extinct in the wild. The last known wild population was taken into captivity in the 1980s to save the species from total extinction.

Sixteen years ago, scientists first observed what appeared to be a quintet of very prominent red stars in a large cluster 26,000 light years away near Galactic Center. Dubbed The Quintuplet, these stars travel in a large cluster and are cocooned in layers of dust - which until now, has puzzled astronomers. Each of these stars have now been revealed to be a huge double star that trails dust into picturesque pinwheel shapes.

The giveaway is the unusual uniformity of the light these double stars emit. Whereas normal starlight varies with different wavelengths, the Quintuplets gave off a uniform, featureless light across a wide waveband. Detailed observations made by one of the 10 meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii revealed that each of the Quints is actually two stars. What astronomers have been seeing is the dust around these double star systems. This dust made each pair appear as a single star.

Two of the infrared images showed elegant spiral-shaped "dust lanes" created by the paths of the stars. These spirals, it is thought, are created by "Wolf-Rayet" stars that create violent stellar winds of up to 2000 km per second (about 48,000 miles per hour!) A Wolf-Rayet star is one that lives fast and dies young, born with a mass at least twenty-five times that of our own Sun. The wind generated by this star slams into that of its partner. Where the two winds collide, the spiral effect is created.

"You have an effect like a garden hose being twirled around,” says Donald Figer from the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. “It’s the last stage before they go supernova, probably within a few hundred thousand years."