Robert Lea

"The sheer amount of radiated energy from these bursts is so large that you can't power them with a core collapse stellar explosion — or any other type of normal stellar explosion."

"We do not know with certainty that we found a superkilonova, but the event nevertheless is eye-opening."

"Virgil has two personalities, its 'good' side – a typical young galaxy quietly forming stars. But Virgil transforms into the host of a heavily obscured supermassive black hole, pouring out immense quantities of energy."

3I/ATLAS has now made its closest approach to the sun and Earth and is now heading back out toward the outer solar system.

"It's like looking back in time in a sense, to that violent period of our solar system when it was less than a billion years old."

"The forces that are needed to dislodge such a massive black hole from its home are enormous."

"This was an absolute surprise. It's extremely different from what we expected."

Smooth filaments stretching for many light-years, seen by the powerful space telescope, could indicate what the right "recipe" is for dark matter.

"A bit like dinosaurs on Earth — they were enormous and primitive. And they had short lives, living for just a quarter of a million years."

"This is a real gift for physicists as we confirm predictions made more than a century ago."

"With ALMA, we can now see the atmosphere of a dying star with a level of clarity in a similar way to what we do for the sun."

The planet formed 50 million years after the dinosaurs died, making it incredibly young in cosmic terms.

"We are only beginning to discover the true complexity of these worlds."

"This is certainly an outburst unlike any other we've seen in the past 50 years."

"It’s kind of a jigsaw puzzle where all the different pieces are moving."

"It means cleaning house, narrowing the viable paths forward, and no longer spending energy on what are evidently dead ends."

"The sizes of these radio jets are not comparable to our solar system or even our galaxy."

NASA's exoplanet-hunting spacecraft TESS has heard the song a star-quaking red giant sings to its partner black hole.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered puzzling ultraviolet radiation around young stars in a stellar nursery.

Scientists may have "heard" the first tantalizing evidence of primordial black holes formed directly from overly dense pockets of matter just after the Big Bang.

"In order to get such high sensitivity in the mid-infrared, one needs to go to space, as the atmosphere severely messes up ground-based observations at this wavelength."

The NASA gamma-ray spacecraft Fermi may have enabled scientists to "see" dark matter, the universe's most mysterious stuff, for the first time.

"If you were able to stand somewhat close to the white dwarf's pole, you would see a column of gas stretching 2,000 miles into the sky, and then fanning outward."

"This challenges our understanding of black hole and galaxy formation in the early universe."