Secrets of gravity

The nature of time is one of the most profound and longstanding problems in physics – one that no one can agree on. From our perspective, time seems to steadily progress forward with each tick of the

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

Get sucked into an astronomical mystery as we get in a spin with the universe’s heaviest objects.

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

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

In the 17th century, the great maritime nations were vying to solve a puzzle that had confounded philosophers for many centuries: how to determine exact positions on the Earth’s surface. And in Britai