Over the past 100 years, researchers have gotten used to labelling things that were previously considered waves as particles and vice versa. One might think that this vacillation between wave and particle-like characterisations is an indication we don’t know what matter is on the smallest scales, and that’s because we…

For years, scientists have been painstakingly measuring the shape of an electron. The precision to which this is now possible is incredibly high, but so are the stakes. If we find even the slightest asymmetry in this humble particle, it could change how we understand the entire universe. Studying the…

On the 7th of January 1610, Galileo was using his newly developed telescope to study the heavens, when he discovered “three fixed stars, totally invisible by their smallness” around Jupiter. Subsequent observations revealed that these points of light couldn’t have possibly been fixed stars. They were closer, and orbiting around…

The Hubble telescope has captured a runaway black hole doing the opposite of what we usually expect them to do. This 20 million solar mass black hole has been charging through intergalactic space, but rather than eating up stars along its path, it has left a 200,000 light-year-long trail of…

Scientists at Durham University have discovered one of the biggest black holes ever seen, at 30 billion times the mass of the Sun. Not only is the black hole pushing the upper limit of how massive these objects can theoretically become, but it was discovered using a totally new technique. …

In the 1990s, astronomers discovered something weird about the expansion of the universe. Observations of distant supernovae revealed that the universe was not just expanding, but accelerating. This was a problem because astronomers had long known that the universe contains a lot of matter (both regular and dark). …

For decades astronomers have invoked a mysterious substance called dark matter to explain a range of phenomena we observe when we look out into the stars. This started with the Coma cluster observed by Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, which seemed to unavoidably contain more mass than could be seen…

You work at the Allen Telescope Array at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California. It’s been a long day and it’s late. Before signing off for the day, you decide to review the latest observations, putting them through your makeshift code designed to pick out anything interesting. Then…

In the 1970s, the astronomer Vera Rubin was observing how the rotation of spiral galaxies changed as she looked along the radius, from the centre to the extreme edge. With a bit of basic Newtonian mechanics — which is sufficient for studying galactic dynamics like this, without venturing into general…