Robert Lea

"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."

"The most convincing scenario is that most of the building blocks of Earth and Theia originated in the inner solar system. Earth and Theia are likely to have been neighbors."

"The discovery of this stream highlights how much is still unknown about the life histories of galaxies, how the hidden universe shapes the realms that we can see."

The data is starting to reveal how galaxies and their black holes evolve.

"We really needed the sensitivity of JWST. We also needed the 100 times magnification from gravitational lensing from a galaxy cluster between us and LAP1-B."

"Throwing a close companion into the mix could possibly wreak further havoc on the already complicated processes surrounding these stars."

Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, general relativity, may not be the best recipe to describe black holes.

"Even though it's the first time we've seen a galaxy like this, we think that there could be many more out there."