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Most newborn black holes spew gas so hard they almost stop spinning

12 February 2024

When black holes are born from collapsing stars, they emit a short-lived jet that may slow down the black hole’s rotation to nearly a standstill

How to understand wormholes and their weird quantum effects

6 March 2023

Classical relativity suggests that nothing could pass through a wormhole and exit, but quantum effects change that, says space reporter Leah Crane

JWST spots smallest galaxy outside our local universe

21 October 2022

The James Webb Space Telescope has glimpsed the smallest galaxy outside our local universe – and it is a thousand times less massive than the Milky Way

Artwork of the young Earth-Moon system. The Earth had recently formed when it was struck by a protoplanet called Theia roughly three times the size of Mars. Debris from the impact went into orbit, while the cores of the two planets merged. Within weeks of the event, the debris formed a Saturn-like ring around the Earth. Later collisions in this ring led to the formation of the Moon, probably within just a few thousand years. Initially the Earth and Moon were much closer together than they are now, and spinning more quickly.

Moon mystery could be solved by simulation of planetary smash-up

11 March 2022

The moon is thought to have been created in a violent collision, and a new simulation of the event could answer questions that have puzzled astrophysicists

Figure 4. Pseudo-color images of all Cepheid-bearing galaxies analyzed in this work.

It’s official – we don’t know how fast the universe is expanding

20 January 2022

The Hubble constant describes how fast the universe is expanding, but our measurements won’t line up, which may mean our standard model of the universe is wrong

Newborn stars, hidden behind thick dust, are revealed in this image of a section of the so-called Christmas Tree Cluster from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The newly revealed infant stars appear as pink and red specks toward the center and appear to have formed in regularly spaced intervals along linear structures in a configuration that resembles the spokes of a wheel or the pattern of a snowflake. Hence, astronomers have nicknamed this the

Sun-like stars may go through brighter phases as they grow up

2 December 2021

Computer modelling supports the idea that nascent stars brighten dramatically during growth spurts, which could explain an astrophysical mystery

WHY is there something rather than nothing?

Why is there something not nothing? The big bang isn’t the only answer

17 November 2021

The idea that the universe started in the big bang revolutionised 20th-century cosmology. But it seems increasingly unlikely it was a case of something from nothing

Lunar craters could reveal past collisions with ancient black holes

29 September 2021

Black holes born in the big bang could be the dark matter physicists have sought for decades – if they exist. Now there's an audacious plan to find the scars they would have left as they punched through the moon

The black hole paradox that thwarts our understanding of reality

22 September 2021

Black holes devour stuff and then shrivel away over billions of years. Explaining what happens to anything that falls in explodes our current theories of physics, says cosmologist Paul Davies

Why there are still huge mysteries in supernova physics

26 May 2021

The explosions of supernovae are so powerful they can be seen with the naked eye. The physics behind them is harder to uncover, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein