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

Astronomers are now regularly detecting planets thousands of light years from Earth – but have we missed one in our own Solar System?

Amazing answers to your curious questions

Our understanding of the Universe has revealed that its existence, and indeed our own, relies on a particular set of rules. For example, the fundamental ‘constants of nature’, such as the charge of th

The year 2025 has been a vintage one for astronomy. In January, we were hooked on reports of a building-sized asteroid on course to collide with Earth. The risk was quickly downgraded from worrying to

Planetary nebula NGC 6537 is nicknamed the Red Spider Nebula for its narrow ‘body’ and spindly ‘legs’ that stretch into the cosmos. But in this new view from the James Webb Space Telescope, what leaps