Articles about 'astronomy'

Among the most fundamental questions in astronomy is: How did the first stars and galaxies form? The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a partnership between NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency, is already providing new insights into this question.

How the Islamic calendar is linked to the lunar cycle

Little ‘hurricanes’ that form in the discs of gas and dust around young stars can be used to study certain aspects of planet formation, even for smaller planets which orbit their star at large distances and are out of reach for most telescopes.

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.

What’s it like to win a Nobel Prize? Does it always come as a surprise? How does it change your life? Professor Didier Queloz, winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics, reflects on what he says was a turning point for him.