Artist’s illustration of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a radio galaxy launching powerful jets (shown in pink) all the way into the galaxy’s CGM. The study finds that these jets do not light up the surrounding gas equally in all directions. Instead, the...
Tidal disruption event close up. Credit: Science Communication Lab. Astrophysicists have uncovered a universal rule behind one of the most powerful behaviours in the Universe: when black holes launch jets. An early-career Western Australian astrophysicist has...
Visualisation of the simulation by ATERUI III showing a rapidly growing black hole surrounded by gas. Red indicates areas of higher temperature. Credit: Sunmyon Chon, Takaaki Takeda, 4D2U Project, NAOJ. The Japanese supercomputer ATERUI III has explained the James...
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons. New research shows that, in statistically rare cases, the giant sunspot of 1947 had the potential to trigger a massive solar flare. The Sun is...
This artist’s impression shows a quasar: a brief period of life for a big, bright galaxy during which large quantities of material spiral into its central supermassive black hole, releasing energetic light as it does so. Quasars are the most luminous objects...
This image of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was taken on 18 January 2026 with the FORS2 instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). It is a stack of several images spanning 14 minutes. As the comet moves on the sky, the stars appear as trails in the background....
This artist’s concept visualises Gaia23bra b, the first microlensing planet orbiting a distant star found by NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite). This super-Jupiter orbits an orange dwarf star at a distance similar to Jupiter’s distance from the Sun....
This illustration depicts the Sun-like star TOI-791 and two giant planets that NASA's TESS space telescope discovered in its orbit. These planets, designated TOI-791 b and TOI-791 c, are roughly the size of Jupiter but a tiny fraction of its mass, meaning they have an...
This image shows a close-up of the gravitationally lensed galaxy nicknamed ‘Shadow Blaster’, which astronomers have identified as the likely source of the high-energy neutrino event IC 210922A, detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in 2021. Gravitational...
Artist's impression of the exoplanet WASP-121 b. It belongs to the class of hot Jupiters. Due to its proximity to the central star, the planet's rotation is tidally locked to its orbit around it. As a result, one of WASP-121 b's hemispheres always faces the star,...
