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A handful of supermassive black holes have been caught doing something no textbook asked them to do. Every few days they switch on, flood their surroundings with X-rays, then switch off again. Days…
In June a camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias stared for two nights at a patch of sky beside the spiral galaxy M94. Ignacio Trujillo, who led the observation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de…
In 2023, the German astrophotographer Marcel Drechsler was working through online hydrogen-alpha sky-survey images of a patch of Sagittarius, far off the plane of the Milky Way, when he noticed a…
Somewhere in the galaxy, particles get flung to energies that dwarf anything a human-built collider can reach. Astronomers call the engines behind them PeVatrons, sources able to accelerate cosmic…
Chemists have a name for the kind of molecule they had never quite caught in space: a true sugar, a carbohydrate with the right skeleton to slot into the chemistry of living things. Simpler…
In the year 1181, astronomers in China and Japan noted a new star in the sky, a "guest star" that lingered for months before fading. Eight and a half centuries later, that entry in the historical…
Cosmic rays arrive at Earth with no return address. They are charged particles, and the Galaxy is threaded with magnetic fields, so by the time one reaches an instrument its direction says nothing…
A brown dwarf never quite made it as a star. Too heavy to be a planet, too light to sustain the hydrogen fusion that powers the Sun, it spends its life slowly cooling. The coldest of them, the…
In September 2017, a single subatomic particle ended a several-kilometre journey deep in the Antarctic ice and set off the detectors of the IceCube observatory. Tracing its path backward across the…