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A pair of German astronomers has proposed that quasars are not, as commonly thought, extremely distant galactic nuclei but are in fact ejected from relatively nearby active galaxies. Their assertion challenges the conventional understanding of redshift, the cosmological ruler which is astronomers' number one tool.

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Capri, Italy—It has been just 10 months since a pair of Swiss astronomers first identified a planet orbiting a sunlike star other than our own, but the tally of so-called “exoplanets” has now passed the total of nine familiar planets of our solar system. That mark came earlier this month at the Fifth International Conference on Bioastronomy, where astronomers reported several new sightings, including the first evidence of another multiplanet system around a sunlike star. And with the total steadily growing, researchers are beginning to identify tentative groupings of planet types, one of which is completely unlike the planets in our solar system.