Read article 'Solving the mystery of a historic stellar blast'
Some 180 years ago, a relatively normal star called Eta Carinae suddenly brightened to become the second brightest star in the sky, before almost disappearing at the end of the 19th century.
Read article 'Elephants in the gamma-ray sky'
The discovery of large-scale features in the gamma-ray sky in approximately the same direction continues to puzzle researchers.
Read article 'Relativity passes test on a galactic scale'
Gravity behaves the same way on a galactic scale as it does in our solar system, and alternative gravity models which remove the need for dark energy are disfavoured.
Read article 'Black holes galore at galactic core'
For decades, theoretical models of galaxy evolution have predicted that the supermassive black hole lying at the heart of the Milky Way is surrounded by thousands of smaller black holes left behind by...
Read article 'HESS proves the power of TeV astronomy'
For hundreds of years, discoveries in astronomy were all made in the visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This changed in the past century when new objects started being discovered at both lo...
Read article 'Hubble expansion discrepancy deepens'
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding by showing that more distant galaxies recede faster from Earth than nearby ones. Hubble’s measurements of the expansion rate, now...
Read article 'Spotting the first extragalactic planets'
Three decades since astronomers first detected planets outside our solar system, exoplanets are now being discovered at a rate of hundreds per year. Although it is reasonable to assume other galaxies ...
Read article 'ESO'
A new national facility at La Silla Observatory in Chile, operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), made its first observations at the beginning of the year. ExTrA (Exoplanets in Transits a...
Read article 'Ancient black hole lights up early universe'
Many questions remain about what happened in the first billion years of the universe. At around 100 million years old, the universe was a dark place consisting of mostly neutral hydrogen without many...
Read article 'Europe defines astroparticle strategy'
Multi-messenger astronomy, neutrino physics and dark matter are among several topics set to take priority in Europe, according to a report by the Astroparticle Physics European Consortium (APPEC).
