Universe unravelled: Stephen Hawking Centre collaborates on new streaming series
13 November 2020The Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology has teamed up with Discovery on a documentary series exploring new windows on our Universe.
The Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology has teamed up with Discovery on a documentary series exploring new windows on our Universe.
“Weather” in clusters of galaxies may explain a longstanding puzzle, according to a team of researchers at the University of Cambridge.
Read more about the female scientists at Cambridge taking their fields by storm - and using International Women's Day to encourage others to do the same.
Astronomers have looked back to a time soon after the Big Bang, and have discovered swirling gas in some of the earliest galaxies to have formed in the Universe. These ‘newborns’ – observed as they appeared nearly 13 billion years ago – spun like a whirlpool, similar to our own Milky Way. This is the first time that it has been possible to detect movement in galaxies at such an early point in the Universe’s history.
An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, used data gathered by the Kepler Space Telescope to observe and confirm details of the outermost of seven exoplanets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1.
Astronomers have made the first measurements of small-scale fluctuations in the cosmic web 2 billion years after the Big Bang. These measurements were conducted using a novel technique which relies on the light of quasars crossing the cosmic web along adjacent lines of sight.
An international team of astronomers have detected glowing oxygen in a distant galaxy seen just 700 million years after the Big Bang. This is the most distant galaxy in which oxygen has ever been unambiguously detected, and it is most likely being ionised by powerful radiation from young giant stars. This galaxy could be an example of one type of source responsible for cosmic reionisation in the early history of the Universe.
New window on the universe is opened with the observation of gravitational waves – ripples in spacetime – caused by the collision of two black holes.
An international team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge have detected the most distant clouds of star-forming gas yet found in normal galaxies in the early Universe – less than one billion years after the Big Bang. The new observations will allow astronomers to start to see how the first galaxies were built up and how they cleared the cosmic fog during the era of reionisation. This is the first time that such galaxies have been seen as more than just faint blobs.
Astronomers have partially solved an epic whodunit: what kills galaxies so that they can no longer produce new stars?