A team of Spanish astronomers has identified a stellar companion near the deuterium-burning mass limit located at a very wide distance, or 670 astronomical units, from the brown dwarf UScoCTIO 108 in the very young Upper Scorpius association. Although other substellar pairs with similar mass ratio are known, the system UScoCTIO 108A and B is the widest identified so far and possibly has a lower gravitational bound energy than any other known low-mass binary.

An astronomer from the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes has obtained spectacular images of the star V838 Monocerotis which became the brightest in our Galaxy when it exploded in January 2002. One of the images will be highlighted on the front cover of the journal Nature on 27 March 2003 and in a research paper published in the same issue.

One of the big unresolved mysteries in the Universe is the origin of the enigmatic gamma-ray bursts (GRB), intense bursts of the highest energy radiation that have been detected by gamma-ray telescopes in space. Until recently these bursts were never seen in the visible light, which hampered further progress in finding an explanation for the GRBs for more than two decades. This situation changed dramatically on February 28.