Latest articles by Robert Lea
Scientists may finally know why Venus, Earth's twin, lacks a moon, finding that the hottest planet in the solar system may have consumed its own natural satellite.
Scientists have spotted the first hints that Einstein's formulation of gravity operates in the quantum realm.
Astronomers have used the MeerKAT radio telescope to detect hydrogen gas located billions of light-years away, from a period when the cosmos was billions of years younger.
Scientists are close to understanding how stars forge the elements that comprise our planet, bodies and pretty much everything else around us, and how they explode to distribute these elements.
"This transition, from a spherical cloud to a protoplanetary disk, is one of the most significant events in all of solar system history."
Over massive supermassive black holes too big for early galaxies and detected by the James Webb Space Telescope may not be quite so massive after all.
Using the LUX-ZEPLIN experiment, scientists may have detected the first direct evidence of dark matter, in the form of a rare interaction between a WIMP particle and ordinary matter.
Studying 75 meteorites falling to Earth, scientists have identified the seven stages a space rock goes through as it crashes through our atmosphere.
Some stars encounter supermassive black holes and live to tell the tale. New research shows why the flares these encounters cause dim over repeated episodes.
Astronomers are closer than ever to confirming the discovery of the first starless or "failed" galaxy, packed with dark matter and gas but with virtually no stars.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have studied 72 young sun-like stars to discover that forming planets is a real race against time.
A newly discovered water dominated exoplanet is in hot-water literally and figuratively, it orbits so close to its parent star it is headed to a fatal collision that will see it devoured.
Betelgeuse may be a well-known and often-studied stellar object, but that doesn't mean astronomers aren't capable of capturing this doomed star in a completely new light.
Unpopular opinion time, Pluto being reclassified as a dwarf planet was a great thing for our understanding of the solar system and for the former planet, too.
The earliest example of the Milky Way cannibalising a smaller galaxy for its growth involved a cosmic meal that left a scar at the heart of our galaxy.
Astronomers have discovered a hitherto unseen population of galaxies with fading radio lobes, revealing what happens to these vast outflows when their black hole engines stall.
A mysterious hum of gravitational waves that fills the cosmos may be the echo of long-dead "dark stars" that served as the seeds of the first supermassive black holes.
New research suggests that if dark matter is composed of "dark photons," it would not have heated the early cosmos like scientists thought.
James Webb Space Telescope is finding that between the brightest stars, the cosmic skyscrapers, there are much fainter stars, meaning early galaxies are more massive than we believed.
"We are very happy to have discovered as-yet-undetected phenomena in the jet."
Astronomers have discovered that the feeding frenzy of a distant black hole ended with a windy outburst.
Astronomers have spotted the blisteringly hot exhaust fumes of the earliest quasars, intensely bright cosmic titans powered by feeding supermassive black holes.
"These are among the best moments in science: seeing something new, unexpected."
Using the Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have seen a jet from a feeding supermassive black hole churning gas surrounding a galaxy nicknamed the "red potato."
