Telescope

Back in April the world got its first direct glimpse of a black hole. Now the team behind this historic work is being awarded a Breakthrough Prize.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most intriguing mysteries of modern astronomy. Now a whopping eight new repeating signals have been detected.

Of all the things you don’t want to lose, an asteroid with a chance of striking Earth is pretty high up the list. A potentially dangerous space rock called 2006 QV89 has been missing in action for 13 years, but now astronomers have finally found it, and ruled out an impact within the next century.

Hubble has discovered a structure around a black hole thought to be impossible. A small, “malnourished” black hole has a disk of material circling it – a feature thought unique to supermassive black holes. This disc is also so close to the black hole that it’s distorting and stretching the light.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the most intriguing mysteries of modern astronomy, so the more of them we can locate, the closer we get to figuring what causes them. Now astronomers have managed to trace an FRB back to its home galaxy, many billions of light-years away.

Scientists have been unable to figure out what fast radio bursts are or where they’re even coming from. Now, a team of astronomers has finally managed to trace one of the signals back to its home galaxy billions of light-years away, meaning we’re closing in on the culprit.

A new way of bending X-rays raises the prospect of smaller, more powerful X-ray space telescopes. Based on technology originally developed for medical imaging machines, the new design replaces conventional mirrors with a network of micro-engineered plastic prisms.

Another 18 exoplanets have been added to the haul, but the difference this time is that all of them are roughly Earth-sized – much smaller than the Neptune-sized average found so far. The discovery was made in old data, using a new and more sensitive algorithm.

Astronomers have discovered a star in the Milky Way that doesn’t belong. Known as J1124+4535, the star has a chemical composition unlike any others ever observed in our home galaxy, suggesting it’s an intergalactic interloper that may have come from a dwarf galaxy swallowed up by the Milky Way.

The first images from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) were snapped this week. DESI is designed to hunt for clues about dark energy by building a comprehensive 3D map of the sky. On April 1 DESI achieved “first light” with a mesmerizing image of the Whirlpool Galaxy.

To look through space is to look through time. Astronomers on a 5-years survey have turned up 100 supermassive black holes from a time when they were thought to be rare, suggesting we might need to rewrite our understanding of their evolution.

A new study has projected that a future NASA telescope could be capable of discovering up to 1,400 new worlds. The orbital telescope, which has been nicknamed WFIRST, will build on the legacy of earlier missions to answer fundamental questions surrounding the nature of the universe.