Research Highlights

A new study has identified the first known permanent population of asteroids originating from outside our Solar System. The objects are believed to have been captured from other stars billions of years ago, and have been orbiting our Sun in disguise...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

New kinds of organic compounds, the ingredients of amino acids, have been detected in the plumes bursting from Saturn's moon Enceladus. The findings are the result of the ongoing deep dive into data from the NASA-ESA mission Cassini-Huygens. A team...

An international team of astrophysicists from Southampton, Oxford and South Africa have detected a very hot, dense outflowing wind close to a black hole at least 25,000 light-years from Earth. Lead researcher Professor Phil Charles from the...

Astronomers have identified a rare moment in the life of some of the universe’s most energetic objects. Quasars were first observed 60 years ago, but their origins still remain a mystery. Now researchers at Durham University, UK, have spotted what...

Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have helped to overturn almost a century of galaxy classification, in a new study using data from the longstanding Galaxy Zoo project. The new investigation, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal...