Images from the NASA space telescopes Spitzer and Hubble have been used in a new study which claims to have found five solar objects very similar Eta Carniae, an erupted solar system within 10,000 light-years of Earth though to be the only one of its kind.

According to Space Daily, Eta Carinae is a solar system which outshines earth’s sun by five million times. It is a binary system, meaning it consists of two massive stars orbiting one another.

“The most massive stars are always rare, but they have a tremendous impact on the chemical and physical evolution of their host galaxy,” said Rubab Khan, lead scientist on the study and postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The types of massive stars that Khan describes produce huge amounts of the chemical elements which are vital to life. Eventually, after millions or billions of years, these massive stars explode into supernovas which hurl these chemical elements into space.

A situation like Eta Carinae — a binary star system containing two massive stars which go supernova concurrently —  was always thought to be incredibly rare and alarmingly unique. However, that did nothing to deter the researchers from carrying out their study.

“We knew others were out there,” said co-investigator Krzystztof Stanek, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University in Columbus.

“It was really a matter of figuring out what to look for and being persistent.”

The survey, which was carried out in 2015, found five objects in space which mimic the optical and infrared properties of Eta Carinae. These objects, dubbed Eta twins, are more than likely high-mass stars not dissimilar from one of the massive stars in the Eta Carnae system.

More will be found out about these rare systems when NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), equipped with instruments ideally suited for further study of these massive and rare stars, launches around its intended date in late 2018.

The U.S. Postal Service has released its designs for its 2016 stamps and has revealed that one of the most important space stories in recent memory, the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, will finally be immortalized in stamp form.

According to Discovery, the New Horizons craft has a bit of history with stamps thanks to the project’s principal investigator Alan Stern. In 2006, when the craft was being prepped for its journey to the edges of our the solar system, it was attached with a 1991-minted Pluto stamp which read “Pluto — Not yet explored.”

Pluto remained entirely unexplored until July 14, 2015, when the New Horizons spacecraft arrived in the Pluto system and began taking some serious beauty shots of the dwarf planet. At the time, Pluto was the last “classical” planet in the solar system to remain unexplored to any capacity.

As a result of the tireless efforts hundreds of NASA scientists, astronomers, and engineers dedicated to the near decade long New Horizons project, the craft will soon be represented in a USPS stamp for commemorative purposes.

“The New Horizons project is proud to have such an important honor from the U.S. Postal Service,” said Stern in a USPS news release. “Since the early 1990s the old, ‘Pluto Not Yet Explored’ stamp served as a rallying cry for many who wanted to mount this historic mission of space exploration.”

“Now that NASA’s New Horizons has accomplished that goal, it’s a wonderful feeling to see these tamps join others commemorating first explorations of the planets.”

The stamps themselves include an artist’s impression of the New Horizons spacecraft along with the now famous composite observation photos taken of Pluto on the craft’s approach.

The USPS. also announced that another set of stamps featuring all the other planets of the solar system will be released as well. Additionally, a set of commemorative Star Trek stamps will see the fronts of many an envelope in 2016.

New research published in an article in the journal Science proposes a future wherein problem solving on massive scale — for example, solving the problem of curing certain devastating diseases, like Alzheimer’s — is handled by large numbers of human beings and artificial intelligences working on small related tasks in tandem.

According to Discovery, human computation is the name for the emerging idea that assigning thousands of human volunteers to work separately with computers on small elements of a larger problem. It is also sometime called crowd computing.

The research indicates that effectively combining computer intelligence with human intelligence, in the form of human computation, has the potential to lead to efficient and effective problem solving on planetary scale. Issues like disease, climate change, and geopolitical strife are cited as massive, wide reaching problems that might better be solved by humans and artificial intelligence working together.

While some tasks are better left to computers — computation and data parsing as obvious examples — even the most advanced artificial intelligence fails to live up to the human brain in certain respects.

One proposed idea involves A.I. management of crowd-based inputs combined into multidimensional collaborative networks.

Here’s how it might work: one small part of a task is sent to one person via their computer. They would do their part and indicate the task as completed. Their task would be processed by the A.I. management, more quickly than would be possible by a human, and then sent to the next human volunteer for the next task.

Researchers from the Human Computation Institute and Cornell University cite in the article multiple occurrences of this new breed of human computation already being utilized. For example, the authors cite an Alzheimer’s research project which utilizes this form of human computation, which could potentially reduce the time it might take to discover an effective treatment from decades to years.

A new method of measuring the gravity of distant stars has been discovered, and astronomers say that it will allow us to find other worlds far more quickly than the old way.

According to BBC, the method, which was discovered by a team of researchers out of the University of Vienna, allows for the possibility of studying even the faintest, most distant stars.

“Our technique can tell you how big and bright is the star, and if a planet around it is the right size and temperature to have water, oceans, and maybe life,” said Professor Jaymie Matthews.

Here’s how it works: a star’s surface gravity is the intensity of its gravitational pull, which attracts everything on its surface towards its center. Before the discovery of the new method, surface gravity was typically calculated by measuring the star’s brightness.

This old technique, however, only worked on the brightest and closest stars. This rendered it ineffective with respect to more distant solar systems.

Using data from the Kepler space telescope, the University of Vienna research team, led by Thomas Kallinger, can measure the distance to far off stars more effectively.

The research posits that the timescale of turbulence and vibration at a star’s surface, based on variations in its brightness, can tell you its gravity.

This technique is intended to be used in the hunt for other Earth-like planets, which are planets which would be capable of having liquid oceans — perhaps even life.

“The size of an exoplanet is measured relative to the size of its parent star,” said Jaymie Matthews, a co-researcher on the study from the University of British Columbia.

The new method allows astronomers to determine the mass of distant stars, in turn allowing them to determine the mass of any planets orbiting the star.

“If you don’t know the star, you don’t know the planet,” said Matthews.