Astronomy

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.

How exactly supermassive black holes got so big remains a mystery, but a new study suggests they may have been born from supernovae of hypothetical, primordial stars far bigger than any around today. And we might soon be able to detect the leftovers.

Computer simulations have revealed that a hostile, tidally locked exoplanet roughly 45 light-years from Earth is capable of hosting tectonic activity — which is one of the key processes that contributes to making a world habitable — on a huge scale.

Last year gravitational waves were detected from a massive black hole collision. But now astrophysicists propose a new explanation: a collision of two boson stars – hypothetical, invisible objects that could help untangle the mystery of dark matter.