Planets usually stay close to their host stars, tracing steady paths shaped by gravity. Yet some planets break free and drift ...

Let's turn the sun into a telescope. In fact, we don't have to do any work—we just have to be in the right spot. But how can the sun be a telescope? The sun is not a mirror, but it is a lens. And we ...

By studying how light from eight distant quasars is gravitationally lensed as it propagates towards Earth, astronomers have ...

Astronomers used a cosmic lens to reveal a hyperactive protocluster. ALMA and VLA observations uncover tightly packed ...

Overlay of the infrared emission (black and white) with the radio emission (colour). The dark, low-mass object is located at ...

This Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 image demonstrates the immense effects of gravity; more specifically, it shows the effects of gravitational lensing caused by a galaxy cluster called SDSS J1152+3313.

The vast majority of matter is dark – invisible until it is detected only through its gravitational effects. The newly discovered object could be a clump of dark matter, or it could also be a compact, ...

It’s one of the most memorable moments of my career – and not in a good way. I was giving a talk to a room packed full of eminent astrophysicists, but there had been a bit of a childcare crisis, so ...

object like a bright quasar hidden behind it. But there has been a persistent mystery for over 20 years: Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts there should be an odd number of images, yet ...

Galaxy clusters are formed by a dense packing of many galaxies, making them the most massive structures in the universe.