The James Webb Space Telescope is the most powerful telescope ever launched into space, its greatly improved infrared resolution, and sensitivity will allow it to view objects too old, distant, and faint for the Hubble Space Telescope, which Nasa designed primarily to conduct infrared astronomy launched on 25 December 2021.

Scientists have a new, more accurate, measurement of the expansion of the universe thanks to decades worth of data from the Hubble Space Telescope.

There may be a problem with the first image of a black hole. After three years of analysis, a group of researchers in Japan has produced an image of M87* – the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy – that looks markedly different from the one released by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration in 2019. The researchers claim that the EHT group may have made a major mistake.

There are few people in the world as qualified to talk about the black hole at the center of our galaxy as 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate Reinhard Genzel. It was his decades-long research into this odd object called Sagittarius A* that gathered enough evidence to prove "beyond any reasonable doubt" that this radio wave-emitting body is indeed the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole.

Scientists from the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research have used computer modeling to show how a hypothesized type of supernova would evolve on the scale of thousands of years, giving researchers a way to look for examples of supernovae of this model, known as "D6."

Space is big, and it’s getting bigger. But where does all that new space actually come from? And is it popping into existence all around you right now? Is that why the remote control is always further away than I thought?

You may have heard that black holes, hyper-dense objects that lurk in outer space, are notoriously hard to spot—let alone hear. But scientists have found a way to peer into the environments around these extreme entities, and even convert some of their so-called “echoes” into eerie sounds for the first time, shared in the below video, using an algorithm named the “reverberation machine,” reports a new study.

Scattered across our Milky Way galaxy are tens of millions of black holes—immensely strong gravitational wells of spacetime, from which infalling matter, and even light, can never escape. Black holes are dark by definition, except on the rare occasions when they feed. As a black hole pulls in gas and dust from an orbiting star, it can give off spectacular bursts of X-ray light that bounce and echo off the inspiraling gas, briefly illuminating a black hole's extreme surroundings.

Revisiting their initial data, LIGO-Virgo Collaboration scientists discover 10 new black-hole mergers. In a new analysis of their gravitational wave data, scientists with the international LIGO-Virgo Collaboration (LVC) have discovered 10 new examples of merging binary black holes.

“Even if the aliens are short, dour and sexually obsessed,” the late cosmologist Carl Sagan once mused, “if they’re here, I want to know about them.” Driven by the same mindset, a Nasa-led team of international scientists has developed a new message that it proposes to beam across the galaxy in the hope of making first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials.

A huge comet with a solid center more than twice the width of Rhode Island is on an orbital path that will swing it inside our cosmic neighborhood, astronomers say. The icy interloper is traveling 22,000 mph from the edge of the solar system toward the sun. In a study published Tuesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists said the comet is no cause for concern because it will not pass anywhere near Earth.

A tug-of-war between neighboring stars led to the formation of two strange types of red giant star, as seen in the eyes of a lost telescope. Astronomers reported finding 40 examples of two different varieties of slimmed-down red giant stars. Scientists expected that such objects existed, since red giants are often in binary systems next to the dense core of a dead star, called a white dwarf, that can sometimes be a greedy neighbor. (These mismatched pairs arise because red giants form together; then, late in their lives, each sheds its layers of gas to become a white dwarf.)

The Hubble Space Telescope caught a galaxy on camera that underlies a much larger structure, known as the Virgo Cluster. The image of spiral galaxy NGC 4571, approximately 60 million light-years from Earth, is part of a partnership between Hubble and other telescopes to provide more information about huge collections of stars.

Imagine if you could look at a snowflake at the South Pole and determine the size and the climate of all of Antarctica. Or study a randomly selected tree in the Amazon rain forest and, from that one tree—be it rare or common, narrow or wide, young or old—deduce characteristics of the forest as a whole.

An “anti-universe” where time runs backwards could exist next to ours, according to a new study. The theory involves the fact nature has fundamental symmetries and researchers think this could apply to the universe as a whole. The theory has been explained in the journal Annals of Physics.

NASA is ramping up plans for a new sky survey tool that could help unravel some of the biggest mysteries about the origin of the universe. The mission, called SPHEREx or Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, is set to launch by April 2025 and will investigate big questions in cosmology, such as what happened in the first few seconds after the Big Bang and how the universe developed and evolved.

Our Solar System was born in chaos. Collisions shaped and built the Earth and the other planets, and even delivered the building blocks of life. Without things smashing into each other, we might not be here. Thankfully, most of the collisions are in the past, and now our Solar System is a relatively calm place. But frequent collisions still occur in other younger solar systems, and astronomers can see the aftermath.

A new Hubble Space Telescope clearly captures the heart of a distant galaxy structured much like our own. The new image shows the "eye" of a galaxy called NGC 1097, which is located 48 million light-years away from Earth. NGC 1097 is a barred spiral galaxy, which puts it in the same category as the Milky Way.

You can also watch a Webb mission update at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 GMT).

Ever considered the notion that everything around you was cooked up by aliens in a lab? Theoretical physicist and former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, Abraham ‘Avi’ Loeb, has proposed a wild – if unsettling – theory that our universe was intentionally created by a more advanced class of lifeform.