Impossible cosmic phenomena

20 amazing answers t o curious

Isn’t it amazing that astronomy – humanity’s oldest science – continues to generate such a delightful amount of new knowledge? Seeing as we’ve been studying the motion of the stars for a good long whi

Our eyes paint such vivid portraits of the world around us that it’s easy to forget how much of our surroundings go unseen. Wi-Fi signals pinging this way and that, subatomic particles and radiation z

Flicking through the pages of BBC Sky at Night Magazine each month, you’d be forgiven for thinking astronomers have black holes pinned down. Whether it’s the dramatic imaging of black hole shadows by

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launched on Christmas Day 2021, astronomers hoped it would revolutionise our understanding of the early stages of the Universe. And they were right. Almost a

Scientists from the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy (IfA) have discovered the most energetic cosmic explosions since the Big Bang. Extreme nuclear transients (ENTs) occur when massive s