Hubble spies a newborn star shining behind a cocoon of dust. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and K. Stapelfeldt (NASA JPL); Image Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America) On October 8, 2022 a sudden wave of energy crashed over Voyager I, momentarily lit up its sensors, and then faded away. Nineteen hours later the same wave reached the orbits of Earth and Mars, swept across two dozen telescopes, and carried on, vanishing into the icy depths of space. Astronomers soon realised the wave had been remarkably powerful. Telescopes designed to hunt for bursts of this kind were blinde ..read more

Totality over North America. Image Credit: NASA/Keegan Barber Until 1998 we thought the universe, on a large scale at least, was dominated by gravity. This is the force, after all, that binds planets to stars, stars to galaxies and galaxies to clusters. But gravity is also an attractive force, and so it should, over a long period of time, tend to pull things together. If the universe happened to be expanding, which we knew it was, then gravity should act to slow it down, and eventually, perhaps, to send it into reverse. And then, after carefully studying distant supernovae, astronomers concl ..read more

Chandra, Webb and Hubble worked together to create this image of Cassiopeia A, the three hundred year old remains of a supernova. Image credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; IR: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/Milisavljevic et al., NASA/JPL/CalTech; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Schmidt and K. Arcand Once every eighty years the star T Coronae Borealis blows up. We know this because we’ve seen it happen at least twice - the first time in 1866, when the star was officially discovered, and another in 1946, when telescopes studied the exploding star in more detail. It has probably happene ..read more

Strange rock formations litter the western end of the Valles Marineris on Mars, like this mesa seen by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. A giant volcano may lurk there too. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona The facts are these. At a little past three in the morning of January 9, 2014, something exploded over the western Pacific Ocean. The event was picked up by military sensors, which showed a fast moving object had struck the Earth and then detonated in the atmosphere. It was, in all probability, a small asteroid encountering our world. This is not controversial. Such things ..read more

The Vela supernova remnant, as captured by the Dark Energy Camera. The full version of this image - visible here - includes a massive 1.3 gigapixels. Image credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA. Twenty-six thousand light years from Earth lies a supermassive black hole. It is, paradoxically, both vast and tiny. The equivalent of four million suns are crushed within it, held in a sphere less than forty million miles across. It is, in all probability, fantastically old. The black hole has lurked at the heart of our galaxy for billions of years, steadily growing along with the Milky Way. Exactly how ..read more

The surprisingly varied surface of Pluto, as seen by the instruments on the New Horizons probe. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute For much of its time the James Webb telescope is focused on the distant universe. It has spied out exoplanets around faraway stars, scanned gas clouds thousands of light years away and even peered across billions of years of space and time into the early cosmos. Sometimes, however, scientists direct it towards a closer target. The telescope has created beautiful images of Saturn and Jupiter, tracked ..read more

The James Webb’s view of SN 1987a, the remains of the closest visible supernova to Earth in the past four centuries. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Mikako Matsuura (Cardiff University), Richard Arendt (NASA-GSFC, UMBC), Claes Fransson (Stockholm University), Josefin Larsson (KTH), Alyssa Pagan (STScI) Reports last week heralded the discovery of the brightest object in the cosmos. It is, they say, fuelled by an enormous black hole, one that weighs billions of times the mass of the Sun. Every day it consumes mass equivalent to that of our solar system, and around it swirls an enormous cloud of ..read more

Intuitive Machines head to the Moon onboard the Falcon 9. Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett In July 1962 the United States detonated a nuclear bomb four hundred kilometres above the Pacific Ocean. The immediate effects of the blast were spectacular. A bright flash of light lit up the night time sky, momentarily creating the illusion of a new sun in the firmament. Even as it faded an aurora lingered, dancing in vivid red flames from New Zealand to Hawaii. Afterwards, radiation from the bomb stuck around. Energetic particles became trapped in the Earth’s magnetic field, forming an artificial rad ..read more

NGC 1512, one of series of spectacular images of galaxies created by the James Webb telescope. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Janice Lee (STScI), Thomas Williams (Oxford), and the PHANGS team I’m pleased to announce a new partnership with V101 Space, a Youtube channel covering space topics in a clear and engaging way. V101 Space will be making video versions of some of my articles. The first - based on last month’s article ‘The Year of the Sun’ - is already online! In 1908 a big chunk of rock or ice smashed into the atmosphere, exploded with the force of a large atomic bomb, and devast ..read more

The centre of the galaxy, as imaged by three of NASA’s great observatories - Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI. The heart of our galaxy is a crowded place. Some ten million stars lie within three light years of its central point, locked in orbit around a supermassive black hole. Beyond that lies the galactic bulge; a collection of ten billion stars stretching ten thousand light years across. That bulge must surely be a spectacular sight, but it is one mostly hidden from our eyes. Countless clouds of dust and gas lie between us and the galactic centre ..read more