A huge ring in the sky

Galaxies come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They can be broadly classified as spiral, elliptical or irregular, but each of these still leaves plenty of scope for variety. Take, for instance, the s

New model suggests Hawking radiation is speeding cosmic decay Scientists have long predicted that the Universe’s lifetime is effectively forever – specifically, 101100 years. But now scientists from R

On 23 July 1999, Space Shuttle Columbia launched its heaviest-ever payload: the Chandra X-ray Observatory, a new flagship telescope for NASA. It is the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope, capable o

I think one of the most interesting things happening in astrophysics at the minute is the rapid development of new ways to study black holes. Whether it’s the virtuoso display of the Event Horizon Tel

The difficulty in creating a theory of ‘quantum gravity’ is that the two ideas look at the Universe at completely different scales. Quantum mechanics looks at the smallest scales of the particles that

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