Astronomy

by Neil Norman A potentially large member of the Kreutz family comets is speeding its way to a perihelion encounter during the first week of April this year. The object was discovered on 13 January 2026. Although not fully confirmed yet, if it is a Kreutz family comet, it will be an unprecedented discovery. Image of comet candidate 6AC4721 (centre), taken via the LCO-SAAO LO9 35-cm reflector on 14 January 2026. Credit: Alan Hale A Kreutz family comet is a member of a group of ‘sungrazing’ comets, whose orbits carry them to within a few solar radii of the Sun’s surface. They are thought to be fragments of a single giant comet that broke apart centuries ago during a close solar encounter. Each fragment now follows a similar, extremely elongated orbit, returning to the inner Solar System eve...

If there is one thing we can rely on in this world, it is human hubris, and space and astronomy are no exception.The ancients believed that everything revolved around Earth. In the 16th century, Copernicus and his peers overturned that view with the heliocentric model. Since then, telescopes and spacecraft have revealed just how insignificant we are. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, each star a sun like ours, many with planets orbiting them. In 1995, the Hubble space telescope captured its first deep-field image: this showed us that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in our known universe, huge wheeling collections of stars dispersed through space.Let’s take the International Astronomical Union’s definition of space as everything in the universe...

For decades, scientists have observed the cosmos with radio antennas to visualize the dark, distant regions of the Universe. This includes the gas and dust of the interstellar medium (ISM), planet-forming disks, and objects that cannot be observed in visible light. In this field, the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile stands out as one of the world's most powerful radio telescopes. Using its 66 parabolic antennas, ALMA observes the millimeter and submillimeter radiation emitted by cold molecular clouds from which new stars are born. Each antenna is equipped with high-frequency receivers for ten wavelength ranges, 35–50 Gigahertz (GHz) and 787–950 GHz, collectively known as Band 1. Thanks to the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics (IAF) a...

As we head towards the end of 2025, it barely seems like five minutes ago that it was June and I was in the Royal Astronomical Society, signing the contract to take over the publication of Astronomy Now. Stuart Clark and Steven Young sign the Astronomy Now change of ownership contract at the Royal Astronomical Society in June 2025. Credit: Neil Monaghan. So much has happened in the six months since that afternoon that it is dizzying to think of it all. As some of you know, my association with the magazine stretches back to the very early 90s, it holds the dearest place in my heart and to be its current steward on your behalf is an honour. The warmth with which so many of you have welcomed me back to Astronomy Now has been heart-warming and inspiring. Yet the magazine is so much bigger tha...

A tawny owl screeches nearby in the dark and her mate replies, hooting eerily from the forest below. A white dome floats in the gloaming above a plain black doorway outlined with red light, like a portal to another dimension. I’m in Grizedale Forest, far from any light-polluting cities, to visit the Lake District’s first public observatory and planetarium, which opened in May.The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.Grizedale Observatory offers immersive films in the planetarium and three-hour stargazing events that go on late into the night. There are sessions on astrophotography and, on moonless nights, dark sky astronomy with the chance to see “a glittering tapestry of stars, galaxies, nebulae and star...