news 2026

Breakthrough discovery provides new clues about how these celestial bodies - that push the known laws of physics to their limits - find each other. Scientists have uncovered the first robust evidence of a black hole and neutron star crashing together but orbiting in an oval path rather than a perfect circle just before they merged.

Scientists reveal that even small differences in solar magnetic activity produce detectable changes inside the Sun. Scientists have analysed more than 40 years of astronomical data to uncover evidence that the Sun's internal structure subtly changes from one solar cycle minimum to the next. Publishing their findings in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , researchers from the University of Birmingham and Yale University reveal that even small differences in solar magnetic activity produce detectable changes inside the Sun.

Astronomers at The University of Manchester have played a leading role in the discovery of a new cosmic object that is much larger than anything astronomers have seen before in the distant universe. This new discovery captures the cosmic moment when a galaxy cluster - among the largest structures in the universe - started to assemble only about a billion years after the big bang, one or two billion years earlier than previously thought possible.

Scientists using data from the James Webb Space Telescope have made one of the most detailed high-resolution maps of dark matter ever produced. It shows how the invisible, ghostly material overlaps and intertwines with 'regular' matter, the stuff that makes up stars, galaxies, and everything we can see.

Scientists at the Dark Energy Survey have published their most detailed explanation yet of how the universe has expanded over the last six billion years, thanks to an unprecedented combination of cosmic measurements. The international group of researchers, including researchers from the University of Cambridge, is led by the US Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

A mysterious bar-shaped cloud of iron has been discovered inside the iconic Ring Nebula by a European team of astronomers. The cloud of iron atoms, described for the first time in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , just fits inside the inner layer of the elliptically shaped nebula - a colourful shell of gas thrown off by a star as it ends the nuclear fuel-burning phase of its life.