When a massive star dies, it can leave behind a black hole. That much has been understood for decades. But the most monstrous black holes in the universe, the heavyweights detected by the faint ripples they send through the fabric of space and time aren't born that way at all. According to a new Cardiff University study, they're built through repeated, catastrophic collisions in the most densely packed star clusters in the cosmos.

Hot Jupiters are the bullies of the planetary world. These colossal gas giants orbit impossibly close to their stars and their gravity is so overwhelming that anything nearby gets scattered, swallowed, or flung into oblivion. Finding a smaller planet surviving inside a hot Jupiter's orbit should be virtually impossible. Yet 190 light years away, that's exactly what astronomers have found.

Every time an astronomer points a telescope at a distant supernova, they're trying to measure how far away it is. But the light from these stellar explosions arrives tangled up with interference from dust, the age of the host galaxy and the chemical make up of the original star . Unpicking it all has always been a painstaking business. Now a team of researchers has used artificial intelligence to cut through the noise in a single step, potentially making cosmological measurements four times more precise. In a universe full of unanswered questions, that's a very significant leap forward.

During the 1970s, pioneering experiments were conducted that are known today as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). At the same time, NASA launched four spacecraft bound for interstellar space, each carrying "messages in a bottle" intended for extraterrestrial beings.

The search for life elsewhere focuses on biosignatures. These are chemicals in atmospheres that can only be attributed to life. But despite the prowess of the JWST, finding slam-dunk proof of life on other worlds is a confounding exercise. New research suggests that rather than focus on individual chemicals, we should look for statistical patterns.

Extremely powerful quasars in the early Universe drove star-forming gas out of their galaxies. These Super-quasars are behind the JWST's puzzling early Universe observations.

Brown dwarfs are notoriously difficult to find. These “failed stars” aren’t big enough to sustain nuclear fusion, and therefore aren’t as bright as more traditional main sequence stars. In fact, they’re nearly invisible in optical light, and faintly visible in infrared. But thanks to dozens of citizen scientists combing through archival infrared datasets from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), and a paper published in the Astronomical Journal detailing their work, we now have an additional set of over 3,000 candidate new brown dwarfs in our stellar neighborhood, more than doubling the total number found so far.

A close flyby past the Red Planet this week will send NASA’s Psyche mission on its way towards its final destination. The mission’s closest approach to Mars occurs on Friday, May 15th, when the spacecraft passes only 4,500 kilometers (2,800 miles) from the surface of the Red Planet. That’s just 1.3 Mars radii distant, inside the orbits of Phobos and Deimos.

Step outside on a clear night almost anywhere in Britain and look up. Chances are you won't see much. An orange coloured washed out glow hangs over every town and city, drowning the stars in a tide of misdirected light. Now the Royal Astronomical Society is demanding that tide be turned back, not just for the sake of astronomy, but because the evidence of what artificial light at night is doing to our health, our wildlife, and our ecosystems has become impossible to ignore. The night, it turns out, isn't just a backdrop. It's a habitat that’s more entwined with our very wellbeing and health than you can possibly imagine. And we're destroying it.

Turn on your kitchen tap and watch the water hit the sink. That split second where fast, shallow water suddenly slows and spreads is known as a hydraulic jump. Now imagine the same thing happening in the atmosphere of Venus, but stretched across 6,000 kilometres of sulphuric acid cloud. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have just revealed that this extraordinary phenomenon, the largest hydraulic jump ever identified in the Solar System, is responsible for a mysterious wave that has been sweeping around our neighbouring planet for years.

When NASA's Artemis II spacecraft carried four astronauts around the Moon earlier this year, the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope was quietly watching from a quiet valley in West Virginia. The Green Bank Telescope tracked the Orion capsule across 213,000 miles of empty space with a precision that would embarrass most speedometers and what it produced isn't just an engineering triumph. It's a glimpse of how the world's most sensitive ears are becoming indispensable to the future of human spaceflight.

You’re an anaerobic microbe sunbathing on a Martian beach billions of years ago listening to the small waves hit the shoreline as you take in the perchlorates in the Martian regolith. This is because while Mars is warm and wet, it still lacks sufficient oxygen, so anaerobic life like yourself doesn’t need oxygen to survive. You’re chilling for several hours and eventually notice the water hasn’t touched you. You remember over-hearing some otherworldly fellows who briefly landed and discussed the landscape didn’t look well formed, so they left.

In 2025, a retreating glacier in Alaska caused a landslide into a fjord named Tracy Arm. The landslide triggered a tsunami that swept down the fjord into the ocean. The tsunami reached a height of more than 480 meters, the second highest tsunami ever recorded.

Jupiter, the gravitational behemoth that makes up a lion’s share of our solar system’s planetary content, is much more complicated than ever previously thought. Or so say leaders from NASA’s highly successful Juno mission.

The cosmological constant has been a problem in physics since Einstein, but new research may show why it takes the value that it does despite quantum fluctuations that should make its value practically infinite.

If you’ve ever taken an introductory astronomy class, you’ve probably seen the Hertzsprung-Russell (HR) diagram. This graph maps out the life cycle of stars by plotting their temperature against their luminosity, and has been a “cheat sheet” for stellar astrophysics for over a century. But the universe is full of more than just stars, and a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from Gabriel Steward and Matthew Hedman of the University of Idaho, attempts to do for the density and mass of all objects what the HR diagram did for the lifecycle of stars - provide a coherent, visual map to represent them.

Life didn't just happen on Earth, a new study suggests that the slow, grinding rise of our planet's continents more than 3.7 billion years ago may have done something extraordinary. Instead it carefully calibrated the chemistry of the ancient oceans to create precisely the conditions life needed to get started. The unlikely hero of the story is a semi precious gemstone.

Since the James Webb Space Telescope switched on, astronomers have been puzzled by hundreds of tiny, ancient, red objects lurking at the edge of the observable universe. Nobody could agree on what they were but now, a single extraordinary discovery of a lone object that behaves differently from all the others may have just solved one of the biggest mysteries of the modern telescope era. In doing so it has revealed a previously unknown chapter in the life story of the universe's most extreme objects.

In February 2013, a 20 metre asteroid exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk without warning, injuring more than 1,600 people and releasing energy equivalent to 33 Hiroshima bombs. Nobody saw it coming but that sobering wake up call directly motivated ESA's Meerkat Asteroid Guard, an automated system watching the skies around the clock for rocks on a collision course with Earth.

A new study by planetary scientists at Harvard offers an explanation for one of Earth’s great climate puzzles: how the Sturtian glaciation, an ancient ice age when the planet was nearly entirely frozen, could have lasted 56 million years. A large igneous province in Canada helped them figure it out.