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For the first time astronomers have detected gravitational waves from a merged, hyper-massive neutron star. The scientists, Maurice van Putten of Sejong University in South Korea, and Massimo della Valle of the Osservatorio Astronomico de Capodimonte...

Solving a decades-old mystery, an international team of astronomers have discovered an extremely hot magnetosphere around a white dwarf, a remnant of a star like our Sun. The work was led by Dr Nicole Reindl, Research Fellow of the Royal Commission...

A team of astronomers from Israel, the U.S. and Russia have identified a disrupted galaxy resembling a giant tadpole, complete with an elliptical head and a long, straight tail, about 300 million light years away from Earth. The galaxy is one million...

A team of Hungarian astronomers and physicists may have confirmed two elusive clouds of dust, in semi-stable points just 400,000 kilometres from Earth. The clouds, first reported by and named for Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1961, are...

New research, published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , has found evidence for a large number of double supermassive black holes, likely precursors of gigantic black hole merging events. This confirms the...

An international team of astronomers have discovered two stars in a binary pair that complete an orbit around each other in a little over three hours, residing in the planetary nebula M3-1. Remarkably, the stars could drive a nova explosion, an...

The Moon may be the key to unlocking how the first stars and galaxies shaped the early Universe. A team of astronomers led by Dr Benjamin McKinley observed the Moon with a radio telescope to help search for the faint signal from hydrogen atoms, in...

Researchers from Keele University have worked with an international team of astronomers to find for the first time that a white dwarf and a brown dwarf collided in a ‘blaze of glory’ that was witnessed on Earth in 1670. The research is published in...

A team of astronomers using the latest set of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission to look for high-velocity stars being kicked out of the Milky Way were surprised to find stars instead sprinting inwards – perhaps from another galaxy....

A UK team of astronomers report the first detection of matter falling into a black hole at 30% of the speed of light, located in the centre of the billion-light year distant galaxy PG211+143. The team, led by Professor Ken Pounds of the University of...

Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a former President of the Royal Astronomical Society, was central to the discovery of radio pulsars when a research student. Now, 44 years later, Jocelyn has won a $3 million Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental...

The annual Perseid meteor shower is set to light up the skies over the UK on the night of 12-13 August. The new moon will mean a darker sky and perfect conditions (given clear skies) for one of the summer months’ most breath-taking spectacles. The...