Astronomy

A team has made some intriguing discoveries in the outer regions of the Milky Way. Astronomers mapped the fringes of the sparse halo that envelops our home galaxy, and found the wake of a dwarf galaxy on an eventual collision course with the Milky Way.

Astronomers have discovered a black hole that may set a new record or two – it seems to be both the smallest black hole ever detected, and the closest one to Earth found so far. It's only 1,500 light-years away and has a mass of just three Suns.

There’s invisible, undetectable stuff all around us, and we call it dark matter. There’s plenty of evidence that this stuff is very real, but what exactly is dark matter? How do we know it’s there? And how are scientists looking for it?

The mystery of fast radio bursts may be closer to being solved. Astronomers studying a repeating signal from a nearby galaxy have detected radiation at the lowest frequency of any FRB found so far, providing new potential hints about their origin.

The first comet known to visit our Sun after being born around an alien star may be the most pristine comet ever discovered, new research has found.

Supermassive black holes create turbulent environments at the centers of galaxies, which should disrupt star formation. But astronomers have peered closer at the heart of the Milky Way and found several “stellar eggs” – and they seem to be hatching.

Astronomers have discovered the aftermath of a cosmic hit-and-run in our own neighborhood. While studying the closest star cluster to the Sun, ESA scientists realized it may have been disrupted by a huge lump of invisible mass, possibly dark matter.

Two years ago, astronomers revealed the first-ever direct images of a black hole. Now, the collaboration behind the historic image has released a new version that shows the polarization of the light around the object.

On a scale that’s hard to fathom, the universe is structured like a “cosmic web." Astronomers have now directly observed light from filaments in this web, by staring at a patch of sky with a deep-field telescope to detect faint dwarf galaxies.

A bizarre object named ‘Oumuamua, defying classification, was the first interstellar object ever discovered. Now a newly proposed origin story neatly explains all of its observed oddities – it may be a piece of nitrogen ice from an “exo-Pluto.”

Supermassive black holes are usually stationary objects, thanks to their huge masses anchoring them in place. But now, astronomers have found evidence of a supermassive monster on the move within its home galaxy.

A team of scientists at the University College London has used 3D tomography to shed new light on the Antikythera Mechanism – the world's first computer, which was an accurate model of the Cosmos as it was known to the ancient Greeks.