Latest News

RAS 2021-2022 Specialist Discussion Meetings. We have a great line up of talks for this coming Specialist Discussion Meetings which will be starting this coming October and running until May 2022. Talks ranging from Galactic magnetic fields, cosmic...

The Royal Astronomical Society is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2021 Patricia Tomkins Undergraduate Prize is Darcey Bower of the University of Liverpool. Darcey won the prize for her project “Building a Magnetic Gradiometer as a Tool for...

The Perseid meteor shower reaches its peak on the night of 12-13 August in the UK and Europe, giving skywatchers a potentially impressive summer treat. The meteors are best viewed from the northern hemisphere, and in ideal conditions with no clouds...

Middle-aged stars can experience their own kind of midlife crisis, experiencing dramatic breaks in their activity and rotation rates at about the same age as our Sun, according to new research published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal...

A team at the Natural History Museum (NHM), London is paving the way for future rovers to search for meteorites on Mars. The scientists are using the NHM’s extensive meteorite collection to test the spectral instruments destined for the ExoMars rover...

A dust storm that engulfed the entire Red Planet in 2018 destroyed a vortex of cold air around the Martian south pole and brought an early spring to the hemisphere. By contrast, the storm caused only minor distortions to the polar vortex in the...

A new approach to analysing the development of magnetic tangles on the Sun has led to a breakthrough in a longstanding debate about how solar energy is injected into the solar atmosphere before being released into space, causing space weather events...

Results from a new survey of astronomers and geophysicists show that these sciences have a systemic bullying problem; one that is disproportionately worse for women and those from minority groups. In a survey carried out by the Royal Astronomical...

Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three state of the art simulations to back up results from a large sky survey, the researchers resolve a 20...

The Royal Astronomical Society is pleased to announce the launch of its first new journal in almost 100 years. Tentatively titled RAS Techniques and Instruments, it will cover topics in astronomy and geophysics ranging from instrumentation, data...

The final stage of cataclysmic explosions of dying massive stars, called supernovae, could pack an up to six times bigger punch on the surrounding interstellar gas with the help of cosmic rays, according to a new study led by researchers at the...

A serendipitous flythrough of the tail of a disintegrated comet has offered scientists a unique opportunity to study these remarkable structures, in new research presented today at the National Astronomy Meeting 2021. Comet ATLAS fragmented just...