The term ‘Big Bang’ might make you think of a massive explosion. Put the thought out of your head. Rather than an explosion, it was the start of everything in the universe.
Didier Queloz helped to revolutionise the search for new worlds outside our Solar system.
Andy Rain/AAP Image
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics went to a cosmologist who helped unlock the secrets of the Big Bang’s aftermath, and two astronomers who found a “hot Jupiter” orbiting a nearby star.
Galaxies evolve in mysterious way. But a new study offers a fresh approach to understand them.
Part of the new map of dark matter made from gravitational lensing measurements of 26 million galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey.
Chihway Chang/University of Chicago/DES collaboration
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is the radiation left over from the birth of the universe.
Move over, multiverse theory.
ESA and the Planck Collaboration
Astronomers have found a giant void in space that explains a mysterious cold spot in the sky. But the search is already on for other voids – and finding them could undermine the discovery.
Some of the antennas of the Murchison Widefield Array radio telescope, designed to uncover what happened in the first billion years of the universe.
Curtin University
More than 100 million years has been wiped off the age of the first stars but there is still the question of what happened in the first billion years of the universe. Earlier this month the European Space…
New data reveals no evidence of gravitational waves in the early universe, as observed by the BICEP2 radio telescope (pictured) near the South Pole.
teffen Richter, Harvard University
One of this century’s greatest potential discoveries concerning the origins of the universe has now fallen to galactic dust. That’s according to a new joint-analysis of all the existing data – including…
Planck telescope and the Cosmic microwave background.
ESA and Planck
In March, scientists working on the BICEP2 experiment, a microwave telescope based at the South Pole, announced that they had seen ‘gravity waves’ from the early universe, created just after the Big Bang…
The universe still holds many secrets.
Aaron Landry/Flickr
Recent observations suggest that there is something not quite right with our view of our universe – that something is skewing our view of the oldest radiation arriving at our telescopes. What’s causing…
There’s a lot of dust between us and the edge of the universe.
H Raab/Flickr
It’s almost three months since a team of scientists announced it had detected polarised light from the afterglow of the Big Bang. But questions are still being asked about whether cosmic dust may have…
Scary but fascinating.
NASA and M. Weiss (Chandra X -ray Center)
Katherine Mack, astrophysicist at the University of Melbourne, answered questions posed by the public on Reddit. The Conversation has curated the highlights. Dark Matter How do you explain dark matter…
Virgo consortium: the web that holds the galaxies together.
Rich Murray
According to cosmologists, galaxies are joined together by filaments, quite literally. These filaments form the cosmic web and are made of mostly dark matter, many stars and some gas. Observing these filaments…
Honorary research fellow in Physics and Astronomy and author of "The Cosmic Microwave Background - how it changed our understanding of the Universe", Cardiff University