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In the search for life elsewhere in the Universe, scientists have traditionally looked for planets with liquid water at their surface. But, rather than flowing as oceans and rivers, much of a planet’s water can be locked in rocks deep within its interior.

Astronomers have directly measured the mass of a dead star using an effect known as gravitational microlensing, first predicted by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, and first observed by two Cambridge astronomers 100 years ago.

A major telescope upgrade has peered through to the distant Universe to reveal the spectra of a pair of galaxies 280 million light years away from Earth.

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

Researchers have been able to make some key determinations about the first galaxies to exist, in one of the first astrophysical studies of the period in the early Universe when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as the cosmic dawn.

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their parent star.

Astrophysicists say that cosmic inflation – a point in the Universe’s infancy when space-time expanded exponentially, and what physicists really refer to when they talk about the ‘Big Bang’ – can in principle be ruled out in an assumption-free way.

Astronomers have observed directly for the first time how intense light from stars can ‘push’ matter. Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Sydney made the observation when tracking a giant plume of dust generated by the violent interactions between two massive stars.

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 speed of the Milky Way today, according to a new study involving ̽»¨Ö±²¥ of Cambridge researchers.

Astronomers have made a record-breaking measurement of a black hole’s spin, one of two fundamental properties of black holes. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows this black hole is spinning slower than most of its smaller cousins. This is the most massive black hole with an accurate spin measurement and gives hints about how some of the universe’s biggest black holes grow.