Topic description and stories

Illustration of the dust ring surrounding HD 181327

First evidence of icy comets orbiting a sun-like star

19 May 2016

Astronomers have found the first evidence of comets around a star similar to the sun, providing an opportunity to study what our solar system was...

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Artist’s impression of the ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 from the surface of one of its planets.

Three potentially habitable worlds found around nearby ultracool dwarf star

02 May 2016

Three Earth-sized planets have been discovered orbiting a dim and cool star, and may be the best place to search for life beyond the Solar System.

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Artist’s impression depicting a compact object – either a black hole or a neutron star – feeding on gas from a companion star in a binary system.

Winds a quarter the speed of light spotted leaving mysterious binary systems

27 Apr 2016

Astronomers have observed two black holes in nearby galaxies devouring their companion stars at an extremely high rate, and spitting out matter at a...

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Artist’s impression of a super-Earth exoplanet orbiting its nearby star

Exoplanet hunter: in search of new Earths and life in the Universe

15 Feb 2016

In 1995, in Geneva, PhD student Didier Queloz discovered a planet orbiting another sun – something that astronomers had predicted, but never found...

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 Detail from animation of a black hole devouring a star

How to escape a black hole

26 Nov 2015

An international team of astrophysicists, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, has observed a new way for gas to escape the...

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Two ‘twin’ stars with identical spectra observed by the La Silla Telescope. Since it is known that one star is 40 parsecs away, the difference in their apparent brightnesses allows calculation of the second star’s distance

Using stellar ‘twins’ to reach the outer limits of the galaxy

04 Sep 2015

A new method of measuring the distances between stars enables astronomers to climb the ‘cosmic ladder’ and understand the processes at work in the...

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Artist’s impression of Gaia14aae

Gaia satellite and amateur astronomers spot one in a billion star

17 Jul 2015

The Gaia satellite has discovered a unique binary system where one star is ‘eating’ the other, but neither star has any hydrogen, the most common...

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Artist’s impression of one of the possible galaxy strangulation mechanisms: star-forming galaxies (fed by gas inflows) are accreted into a massive hot halo, which ‘strangles’ them and leads to their death.

Cause of galactic death: strangulation

13 May 2015

Astronomers have partially solved an epic whodunit: what kills galaxies so that they can no longer produce new stars?

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Illustration of the outflow (red) and gas flowing in to the quasar in the centre (blue). The cold clumps shown in the inset image are expelled out of the galaxy in a 'galactic hailstorm'

Galactic ‘hailstorm’ in the early Universe

16 Jan 2015

Astronomers have been able to peer back to the young Universe to determine how quasars – powered by supermassive black holes with the mass of a...

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The first standardised way to measure stars has been developed for Gaia mission

Spectral ‘ruler’ is first standardised way to measure stars

24 Jun 2014

A team of astronomers have created the first standardised set of measurement guidelines for analysing and cataloguing stars.

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At the outer fringes of the system, the gravitational influence of a hypothetical giant planet (bottom left) captures comets into a dense, massive swarm (right) where frequent collisions occur.

Galactic gas caused by colliding comets suggests mystery ‘shepherd’ exoplanet

06 Mar 2014

Latest research has uncovered a massive clump of carbon monoxide in a young solar system. The gas is the result of near constant collisions of icy...

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Milky Way Over Crater Lake

Gaia-ESO data show Milky Way may have formed ‘inside-out’, and provide new insight into Galactic evolution

20 Jan 2014

Research on first data release from Gaia-ESO project suggests the Milky Way formed by expanding out from the centre, and reveals new insights into...

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