A huge ring in the sky

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,

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

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

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

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