NASA's Dawn spacecraft has reached dwarf planet Ceres and achieved orbit around it on Friday, March 6, 2015. Dawn was approximately 61 000 km (38 000 miles) away from Ceres when it was captured by its gravity at about 12:39 UTC.

Mission controllers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) received a signal from the spacecraft at 13:36 UTC that Dawn was healthy and thrusting with its ion engine, the indicator Dawn had entered orbit as planned.

"Since its discovery in 1801, Ceres was known as a planet, then an asteroid and later a dwarf planet," said Marc Rayman, Dawn chief engineer and mission director at JPL. "Now, after a journey of 4.9 billion km (3.1 billion miles) and 7.5 years, Dawn calls Ceres, home."

With fireball season underway there are many reports of bright fireballs coming in from all over the world, the latest coming from India on February 27. The season will last until April. 

Total solar eclipse will occur on March 20 when the Moon will completely block the Sun. The path of totality for this eclipse will be limited to the North Atlantic and Arctic Oceans between Greenland and northern Russia.

On the same day, at 22:45 UTC, March Equinox will occur. The Sun will shine directly on the equator and there will be nearly equal amounts of day and night throughout the world. This is also the first day of spring (vernal equinox) in the Northern Hemisphere and the first day of fall (autumnal equinox) in the Southern Hemisphere.

A team of Brazilian astronomers led by Denilso Camargo of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul have made a remarkable discovery, a cluster of stars forming on the very edge of the Milky Way galaxy. This is the first time astronomers have found stars being born in such a remote location.

Our galaxy has a barred spiral shape, with arms of stars, gas and dust winding out from a central bar. Viewed from the side, it would appear relatively flat, witm most of the material in a disc and the central regions.

Stars form inside massive and dense clumps of gas in so-called giant molecular clouds (GMCs) that are mainly located in the inner part of the galactic disc. With many clumps in a single GMC, most (if not all) stars are born together in clusters.

Denilso’s team looked at data from NASA’s orbiting Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) observatory. They not only found GMCs thousands of light years above and below the galactic disc, but that one of them unexpectedly contained two clusters of stars.