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A National Astronomy Week (NAW) will be held in the UK from Saturday 14 November to Sunday 22 November 2020. The aim of the week is to celebrate the close approach of Mars, and to give members of the public the chance to see the red planet in closeup...

When it comes to the biggest and brightest explosions seen in the Universe, University of Warwick astronomers have found that it takes two stars to make a gamma-ray burst. New research solves the mystery of how stars spin fast enough to create...

The Royal Astronomical Society is pleased to announce the winners of its medals and prizes for 2020, the bicentenary of its foundation. Each year the Society recognises significant achievement in the fields of astronomy and geophysics through these...

The Royal Astronomical Society is sorry to hear of the death of Professor John C. Brown, Astronomer Royal for Scotland, and the 2012 winner of the RAS Gold Medal. John was a long standing supporter of the Society and its work, served on its governing...

North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2003. It subsequently developed nuclear weapons, with five underground nuclear tests culminating in a suspected thermonuclear explosion (a hydrogen bomb) on 3...

Astronomers have spotted an ultrafast star, travelling at a blistering 6 million km/h, ejected by the supermassive black hole at the heart at the Milky Way five million years ago. The discovery is described in a new paper in the journal Monthly...

A rare transit of Mercury will take place on 11 November, when the smallest planet in our Solar System will pass directly between the Earth and the Sun. The last time this happened was in 2016, and the next will be in 2032. During the transit, which...

Scientists from Germany and the United States have unveiled the results of a newly-completed, state of the art simulation of the evolution of galaxies. TNG50 is the most detailed large-scale cosmological simulation yet. It allows researchers to study...

In celebration of the 200 years since its foundation, the Royal Astronomical Society will hold its 2020 National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2020) in the city of Bath. The Society’s founding president Sir William Herschel and his sister Caroline lived in...

“Weather” in clusters of galaxies may explain a longstanding puzzle, according to a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge. The scientists used sophisticated simulations to show how powerful jets from supermassive black holes are...

Astronomers have completed the largest survey to date of the faint outskirts of nearby galaxies, successfully testing a low-cost system for exploring these local stellar systems. R. Michael Rich of the University of California, Los Angeles led an...

An international team of astronomers, led by the University of Southampton, have used state-of-the-art cameras to create a high frame-rate movie of a growing black hole system at a level of detail never seen before. In the process they uncovered new...