On what might have been the proudest day of Jack Burns’s long career in astronomy, he was sitting on a beach. Orbital dynamics and launch schedules wait for no one, and Burns couldn’t move his ...

Nowadays, the dark of night is interspersed with the light of stars. But before the stars were born, did light shine at the beginning of the universe? The short answer is "no." But the long answer ...

A radio signal from the early universe could allow us to understand how everything that surrounds us began. The signal – known as the 21-centimetre signal – could finally let us understand how the ...

Understanding how the universe transitioned from darkness to the emergence of stars marks a critical shift known as Cosmic Dawn. Yet, astronomers have struggled to unravel details about the first ...

In a monumental breakthrough, scientists have recreated the universe’s first molecule, helium hydride (HeH⁺), solving a puzzle that has baffled astronomers for over 13 billion years. The discovery ...

About 13.8 billion years ago, the newborn universe was a blazing sea of energy and particles. Within minutes of the Big Bang, conditions had cooled enough for the very first atoms—mostly hydrogen, ...