We may have a stolen planet in our own Solar System.
A composite image of the data collected by the ALMA telescope in Chile, showing spiral galaxies in the Virgo Cluster.
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Dagnello (NRAO)/T. Brown (VERTICO)
Studying the extreme environment of the Virgo Cluster — which comprises thousands of galaxies — helps us learn what factors can affect and start or stop star formation.
Gravitational waves reveal the demise of super-dense neutron stars spiralling into their black hole companions - the first time such strange and exotic star systems have ever been observed.
The launch of Hubble Space Telescope on April 24, 1990. This photo captures the first time that there were shuttles on both pad 39a and 39b.
NASA
Thirty years ago the Hubble Space Telescope began snapping photos of distant stars, providing a time machine that has taken astronomers back to when the universe was less than a billion years old.
A planet-forming disk made from rock and gas surrounds a young star.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/ Gerald Eichstädt /Seán Doran
Why isn’t there an endless variety of planets in the universe? An astrophysicist explains why planets only come in two flavors.
Galaxy cluster MACS J1149.5+2223 taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. The inset image is the very distant galaxy MACS1149-JD1.
ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, W. Zheng (JHU), M. Postman (STScI), the CLASH Team, Hashimoto et al.
Astronomers have indirectly spotted some of the first stars in the universe by making their most distant detection of oxygen in a galaxy that existed just 500m years after the Big Bang.
The dark band is the Dark Doodad Nebula, a place where new stars and planets can form.
Flickr/cafuego
Astronomers are surprised by what they’re finding out about galaxies that formed in the early days of our universe, now that sensitive telescopes allow direct observation, not the inference of old.
Untangling the history of the Milky Way.
ESO/S Brunier
Extragalactic astrophysicists want to know how and why galaxies stop forming stars, change their shape and fade away. With help from citizen scientists, they’re figuring it out.
The edge of the Horsehead nebula, where it touches the empty space outside it, is rich in carbon.
NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Astronomers have built a new observatory in the cold dry air of a high plateau in Antarctica to peer through our atmosphere and observe carbon in our galaxy.
Like a cosmic roulette wheel, we exist because of a very lucky combination of factors.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
If some of the laws of physics were only infinitesimally different, we would simply not exist. It almost looks like the universe itself was built for life. But how can that be?
NASA artists’ interpretation of the neutron star Swift J1749.4-2807 (left) with it’s companion star (right).
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
They’re are the overachievers of the universe: incredibly dense but very small when compared to others stars. So how much do we know about the extreme behaviour of neutron stars?
A colour image of G63349, one of the galaxies in the survey, created using near-infrared (VISTA telescope) and optical (Sloan telescope) data collated by the GAMA survey. (The bright green object is a nearby star.)
ICRAR/GAMA
Researchers have created a star-forming cloud in the laboratory to try to recreate the first-ever biological molecule. The study could explain why such molecules are left-handed.