Ancient interstellar object detected

This October marks 50 years since a heavily shielded spacecraft, the Soviet Union’s Venera 9, parachuted into the atmosphere of Venus. Then, having landed, it did something extraordinary: it beamed ba

New Horizons was the first mission sent to explore Pluto, conducting a fly-by in July 2015. It was then redirected for a close pass of a much smaller Kuiper Belt object, Arrokoth, in January 2019. Tod

The number of planets discovered orbiting other stars stands at over 6,000 and counting, but that’s just the confirmed ones. Many more candidate exoplanets are awaiting verification, some of which are

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

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,

I looked out of the window before bed while on holiday in Orkney in mid-August and was delighted to see my first-ever noctilucent cloud display! The reflections in the still waters of the Bay of Firth