Latest News

Mary Somerville from RAS collection
Mary Somerville features in Google Doodle
The Google Doodle for 2 February 2020 celebrates Mary Somerville, the Scottish polymath and science writer, and with Caroline Herschel, the joint first ever woman to be made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society. Born in Jedburgh...
Mars in 2018
Coming this November: National Astronomy Week to mark best view of Mars until 2033
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...
Artist’s impression of gamma-ray burst with orbiting binary star
Stars need a partner to spin Universe’s brightest explosions
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...
Professor Sandra Moore Faber
Leading astronomers and geophysicists honoured in RAS bicentenary year
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...
Professor John Campbell Brown receives the RAS Gold Medal
Professor John Brown, OBE, 1947-2019
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...
Digital rendering of the Sentinel-1 satellite in orbit, projecting a radar beam onto the Earth.
Space-based radar suggests North Korean nuke equivalent to '17 Hiroshimas'
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...
Hyper velocity star
Hyper-fast star ejected by supermassive black hole
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 photograph of the transit of Mercury of 9 May 2016
Rare transit of Mercury to take place on 11 November
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...
Face-on image of a spiral galaxy
Galactic fountains and carousels: order emerging from chaos
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...
University of Bath
National Astronomy Meeting 12-17 July 2020: save the date!
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...
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Stormy cluster weather could unleash black hole power and explain lack of cosmic cooling
“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...
Edge-on spiral galaxy NGC 3628
HERON survey fishes out detail in ghostly galaxy outskirts
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...