Author: Jonathan O’Callaghan

If you have ever seen the Milky Way in the night sky, you probably noticed that it looks cloudy. That is because towards the centre of our galaxy, and of most galaxies, there are vast amounts of dust that make it hard to see what is going on. That means a big swathe of the […]

For decades, we have been littering space with decommissioned satellites and rocket parts orbiting our planet. Now this space debris poses a growing threat to the satellites and spacecraft we rely on. But researchers believe some of this debris could be turned into a valuable resource. According to the European Space Agency, more than 2 700 dead […]

In 2019, a strange event was observed in the depths of space. Called GW190521, the event sent out gravitational waves – invisible ripples in the universe – that were picked up on Earth. These waves appeared to mark the moment when two massive black holes, dozens of times the mass of our Sun, collided and […]

Below the waves of the Mediterranean, Europe’s KM3NeT neutrino telescope is on a cosmic hunt. Towering strings of sensors stretch a kilometre down to the seafloor, arranged in a vast 3D grid. Its mission? To capture ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos, messengers that can travel unhindered across the universe – even through planets and stars […]

Across the billions of galaxies and stars in the universe, only one place is known to host life – Earth. Yet the hope of finding other living worlds drives scientists to pursue ever-smarter methods in their search. Despite cataloguing roughly 6 000 exoplanets, a replica of Earth – a planet similar in size that orbits a […]

Can light ever be a solid? It turns out that, in the microscopic world of the quantum realm, maybe it can. In a recent groundbreaking EU-funded study published in Nature, a team of researchers succeeded in creating supersolid light – a strange, hybrid state of matter that combines the structure of a solid with the […]

An international team of researchers is developing a model of Mars’s evolution that could unlock some of its long-held secrets, including whether it once harboured life. François Forget, a space scientist from the Pierre Simon Laplace Institute in France, is the man looking for those answers. He is not a time traveller, but is hoping […]

Yuri Shprits, a space scientist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, is on a mission to save our planet.  We have known for a long time that much of our modern way of life is threatened by the whims of the Sun. If our star suddenly enters a more active period, it […]

The formation of galaxies in the universe should follow a fairly simple path. It starts with small galaxies, which then grow bigger and bigger until they become the giant galaxies we see in the modern universe, like our Milky Way. Easy, right? But that is not strictly true for a particular class of elliptical galaxies […]

A widespread misconception has long equated black holes in space with nothingness, ‘the end of everything’. But a global team of scientists, including EU-funded researchers, has managed to photograph them, discovering enough new evidence to take their probe even further.  Dutch-German astronomer and professor Heino Falcke is one of those who want to understand “the […]