How to find a speck in space

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

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,

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

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

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

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