Farewell, Gaia: spacecraft operations come to an end
27 March 2025The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been powered down, after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft has been powered down, after more than a decade spent gathering data that are now being used to unravel the secrets of our home galaxy.
Astronomers have identified a bright hydrogen emission from a galaxy in the very early Universe. The surprise finding is challenging researchers to explain how this light could have pierced the thick fog of neutral hydrogen that filled space at that time.
The European Space Agency’s Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission, racking up more than three trillion observations of about two billion stars and other objects over the last decade to revolutionise the view of our home galaxy and cosmic neighbourhood.
Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the ‘inside-out’ growth of a galaxy in the early universe, only 700 million years after the Big Bang.
Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope to confirm that supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel they need to form new stars.
Astronomers have detected carbon in a galaxy just 350 million years after the Big Bang, the earliest detection of any element in the universe other than hydrogen.
The two earliest and most distant galaxies yet confirmed, dating back to only 300 million years after the Big Bang, have been discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers today announced.
A galaxy that suddenly stopped forming new stars more than 13 billion years ago has been observed by astronomers.
A team of astronomers, led by the University of Cambridge, has used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to reveal, for the first time, what lies in the local environment of galaxies in the very early Universe.
Researchers have discovered the oldest black hole ever observed, dating from the dawn of the universe, and found that it is ‘eating’ its host galaxy to death.