How to grow a black hole

The question of how black holes grow should be an easy one to answer: they absorb material from their surroundings. But despite their fearsome reputation, supermassive black holes don’t rampage throug

Many of the most dramatic cosmic events take the form of explosions, from asteroid impacts to the Big Bang itself. Here are some of the most spectacular examples

There’s a worrying problem with the ‘Higgs field’ — the energy field that gives particles their mass. It seems to be dangerously close to having an inherent instability. In the absence of particles, t

How do astronomers currently think the Universe is expanding? Astronomers have long believed the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, driven by what we call ‘dark energy’. This led to a mode

The prevailing Nobel Prize-winning theory that the Universe is expanding at an ever-accelerating rate due to the unseen influence of dark energy has been called into question by a new study. Astronome

As an astronomer, I collect stars. There are several hundred billion of them in our Galaxy, the Milky Way, so it’s important to find a way to categorise them. While others might rank their stars by co