Hidden universe

Astronomers love a challenge. They place their observatories on the highest mountains, in the driest deserts, on the coldest ice shelves, beneath the deepest oceans, in orbit around Earth and the Sun,

Ten years ago, on 14 September 2015, a new window on the Universe was opened, giving us a novel way of studying exotic, high-energy objects such as black holes and neutron stars: the first direct dete

What is normal or ‘ordinary’ matter? When astronomers talk about normal matter, we’re referring to baryons. By that, we just mean ‘the stuff of atoms’ – things like protons and neutrons. How did we fi

The worst time to look at the Moon is when it’s full, right? Not necessarily. It’s true that at full Moon, sunlight hits the surface head-on, flattening the appearance of its rugged landscape of deep

A supermassive black hole has been discovered that formed when the Universe was just 3 per cent of its current age – around 500 million years after the Big Bang, or 13.3 billion years ago. Found in th

Did you know? The nearest black hole is ...