universe

Topic description and stories

Five-dimensional black hole could ‘break’ general relativity

19 Feb 2016

Researchers have successfully simulated how a ring-shaped black hole could cause general relativity to break down: assuming the universe contains at...

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...

An artist's impression of a hypernova, an explosive death of a star roughly ten times more energetic than a normal supernova.

Ancient stars at the centre of the Milky Way contain ‘fingerprints’ from the very early Universe

11 Nov 2015

Astronomers have discovered some of the oldest stars in the galaxy, whose chemical composition and movements could tell us what the Universe was like...

̽��ֱ��central object is a very distant galaxy, labelled BDF 3299. ̽��ֱ��bright red cloud just to the lower left is the ALMA detection of a vast cloud of material that is in the process of assembling the very young galaxy

Astronomers witness assembly of galaxies in the early Universe for the first time

22 Jul 2015

An international team of astronomers led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have detected the most distant clouds of star-forming gas yet found in normal...

Artist's impression of the SKA, which will be made up of thousands of dishes that operate as one gigantic telescope

Masters of the universe

19 Jun 2015

̽��ֱ��‘world’s largest IT project’ — a system with the power of one hundred million home computers — may help to unravel many of the mysteries of our...

Polarisation of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Planck reveals first stars were born late

05 Feb 2015

New maps from the Planck satellite uncover the ‘polarised’ light from the early Universe across the entire sky, revealing that the first stars formed...

Illustration of the outflow (red) and gas flowing in to the quasar in the centre (blue). ̽��ֱ��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...

Map of the cosmic microwave background, Credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration

Planck captures portrait of the young Universe, revealing earliest light

21 Mar 2013

Satellite’s first all-sky image is the most detailed picture to date of the early Universe, giving us a better understanding of its birth.

Where God meets physics

28 Nov 2011

Eminent thinker and commentator Revd Dr John Polkinghorne, Fellow of the Royal Society, will be giving a public talk – titled A Destiny Beyond Death...