Topic description and stories

False-colour JWST image of a small fraction of the GOODS South field, with JADES-GS-z7-01-QU highlighted

Astronomers spot oldest ‘dead’ galaxy yet observed

06 Mar 2024

A galaxy that suddenly stopped forming new stars more than 13 billion years ago has been observed by astronomers.

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The GN-z11 galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope

Astronomers detect oldest black hole ever observed

17 Jan 2024

Researchers have discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, dating from the dawn of the universe, and found that it is ‘eating’ its host galaxy...

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Artist's impression of the predicted collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda

Dark energy could be measured by studying the galaxy next door

14 Aug 2023

Researchers have found a new way to measure dark energy – the mysterious force that makes up more than two-thirds of the universe and is responsible...

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The image shows a deep galaxy field, featuring thousands of galaxies of various shapes and sizes. A cutout indicates a particular galaxy, known as JADES-GS-z6, which was a research target for this result. It appears as a blurry smudge of blue, red and green.

Webb sees carbon-rich dust grains in the first billion years of cosmic time

19 Jul 2023

For the first time, the James Webb Space Telescope has observed the chemical signature of carbon-rich dust grains in the early universe.

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A new map of the dark matter made by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. The orange regions show where there is more mass; purple where there is less. The typical features are hundreds of millions of light years across. The grey/white shows where contaminating light from dust in our Milky Way galaxy, measured by the Planck satellite, obscures a deeper view.

New findings that map the universe’s cosmic growth support Einstein’s theory of gravity

11 Apr 2023

A new image reveals the most detailed map of dark matter distributed across a quarter of the entire sky, reaching deep into the cosmos.

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This image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope highlights the region of study by the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES).

Webb telescope reaches new milestone in its search for distant galaxies

09 Dec 2022

New findings confirm that JWST has surpassed the Hubble telescope in its ability to observe the early Universe

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A pin being pushed into a bubble, in which there is an image of the Universe

Can cosmic inflation be ruled out?

03 Nov 2022

Astrophysicists say that cosmic inflation – a point in the Universe’s infancy when space-time expanded exponentially, and what physicists really...

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The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) by night

Slow spin of early galaxy observed for the first time

01 Jul 2022

One of the most distant known galaxies, observed in the very earliest years of the Universe, appears to be rotating at less than a quarter of the...

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Messier 101 (The Pinwheel Galaxy)

Supermassive black holes put a brake on stellar births

21 Mar 2022

Black holes with masses equivalent to millions of suns do put a brake on the birth of new stars, say astronomers. Using machine learning and three...

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Visualisation of radiation from a cosmic string network

Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology named Intel oneAPI Center of Excellence

26 Oct 2021

The Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology (Hawking CTC) at the University of Cambridge is expanding its Intel Graphics and Visualization...

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Bright red and yellow sun

Have we detected dark energy? Cambridge scientists say it’s a possibility

15 Sep 2021

Dark energy, the mysterious force that causes the universe to accelerate, may have been responsible for unexpected results from the XENON1T...

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The cosmologist modelling the Universe with maths

18 Feb 2021

Dr Tobias Baldauf likes nothing better than seeing an equation ‘cross reality’. His work is helping us to answer some of the remaining questions...

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