Already travelling at super-hurricane speeds, winds on Venus have accelerated by an astonishing one-third over the past six years, the European Space Agency (ESA) reported on Tuesday. Separate teams of astronomers analysed images from ESA's Venus Express orbiter, monitoring cloud patterns on our closest neighbour. When Venus Express started operations in 2006, high-altitude winds between latitudes 50 degrees either side of the equator were recorded at about 300 kilometres (187 miles) per hour on average, they found.

Breaking new ground in the detection of planets beyond our solar system, European astronomers on Monday said they had recorded the most lightweight world to be discovered so far through direct observation. Hundreds of extra-solar planets have been found since 1995, but almost all of them have been discovered through inference -- by the way their gravitational pull affects their star's light or the star itself. The new discovery is a gas giant about four to five times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet of our solar system, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) said.

Sky-gazers were treated to an annular solar eclipse in remote areas of Australia on Friday, with the Moon crossing in front of the Sun to leave a "ring of fire" around its silhouette. The eclipse, which occurs when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun but is too close to the Earth to completely cover the Sun, was seen in full across northern Australia, while Sydney saw a partial eclipse. "It was perfect," said Geoff Sims, who photographed the event from a remote spot in Western Australia.

Using a potent NASA space telescope to scan the skies for planets like ours where life might exist, astronomers said Thursday they have found the most Earth-like candidates yet. Two of the five planets orbiting a sun-like star called Kepler-62 are squarely in what astronomers call the habitable zone -- not too hot, not too cold and possibly bearing water, researchers said in the journal Science. "These two are our best candidates that might be habitable," said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA's Ames Research Center.