CFH Telescope Image:The Lagoon Nebula, Messier 8

Credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope/Coelum

The Lagoon Nebula, also called Messier 8, lies deeply embedded in the disk of our galaxy. 

Stars form within this giant region, and they gravitationally cluster in the heart of the nebula. 

Ultraviolet radiations from newborn stars ionize hydrogen gas, creating the pink emission.

Activating a Supermassive Black Hole

This very deep image shows the COSMOS field imaged by the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT). Huge numbers of very faint galaxies are visible.

A new study of this field, combining data from ESO's Very Large Telescope and ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory has turned up a big surprise.

Most of the huge black holes in the centres of active galaxies in the past 11 billion years were not turned on by mergers between galaxies, as had been previously thought.

Some of the active galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centres that were used in the new study are marked with red crosses on this picture.

Credit: CFHT/IAP/Terapix/CNRS/ESO

Leading cause of blindness identified - Age-related macular degeneration (AMD)

The mechanism behind a leading cause of blindness has been discovered, which could result in new treatments for a disease that causes 50 per cent of all blindness in the western world.

Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is caused by damage to the macula – part of the retina at the back of the eye – and is thought to be linked to alterations in the gene resonsible for CFH, a protein involved in the body's immune response.

To work out how this might cause AMD, Paul Bishop at the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues applied normal and diseased forms of CFH to macula obtained from donated eyes. Abnormal CFH seemed unable to bind to the macula, probably as a result of not being able to bind to two specific carbohydrates.

If there is not enough functional CFH bound to the macula, the immune system does not recognise the tissue as its own and so will attack it, says Bishop. "Now that we know the mechanism, we can think about treatments, such as injecting CHF into the bloodstream."