Beyond Earthly Skies

Gandolfi et al. (2014) report on the discovery of a half-Jupiter mass planet transiting an old Sun-like star every 2.7 days. This discovery...

To date, ~10 brown dwarfs are known around giant stars (i.e. evolved stars). Brown dwarf are objects more massive than planets, but are not...

A gravitational microlensing search by R. Poleski (2014) revealed the presence of a Uranus-type planet in orbit around a 0.6 solar mass sta...

O-type stars are amongst the most massive and most luminous stars. Isolated O-type stars that move independently through the interstellar m...

On Earth, the presence of tectonic activity maintains the carbon cycle and acts as a thermostat, moderating the greenhouse effect. Earth-si...

The ever growing number of detected exoplanets shows that small planets are far more common than larger ones. A study by Morton & Swift...

Asteroids range in size from a few meters to a few hundred kilometres. Observations indicate that asteroids larger than 150 m have rotation...

The globular cluster NGC 6388 is believed to harbour an intermediate mass black hole (IMBH) with ~1000 times the Sun’s mass at its centre. O...

A supermassive black hole (SMBH) with ~4 million times the Sun’s mass sits in the centre of the Milky Way. Over the decades, observations h...

At the centre of the Milky Way sits a supermassive black hole (SMBH) with a mass of around 4 million times the mass of the Sun. A close enco...