Independent reporting on space, archaeology and ancient worlds
For the passionately Curious
Browse Curiosmos
Astronomers have found 84 objects in nearby galaxies that do not behave like the familiar X-ray sources catalogued over the past six decades. They are bright at the lowest X-ray…
When people picture a galaxy, they often imagine a bright spiral like the Milky Way or Andromeda. The shape is memorable, but it is only the visible part of the…
Astronomers have directly measured an extremely faint radio signal from neutral hydrogen billions of light-years away. The detection, made with South Africa’s MeerKAT array, gives researchers a new way to…
The universe is forming stars at less than half the rate it did roughly 4.5 billion years ago. A new survey now shows that this decline cannot be explained simply…
For nearly two decades, astronomers have not been sure which galaxy produced the short gamma-ray burst GRB 061201. New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope point to a faint…
A quasar is a distant galaxy with a brilliant active centre. Here is how a feeding supermassive black hole can outshine every star around it.
How do telescopes measure the motion of distant galaxies? They read the fingerprints of atoms in the light those galaxies emit. A photograph can show a spiral, a cluster or…
Spiral galaxies are often drawn as graceful pinwheels, with arms that curl around a bright centre in something close to balance. NGC 4654 is a one-sided spiral galaxy that does…
For exploring the universe, its distant galaxies, stars, planetary nebula, and now even black holes, humankind has at its disposal a number of different tools. Some of these tools —…