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

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

An artist’s impression of Cha 1107-7626 accreting material ...

Amazing answers to your curious questions

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

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