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 ...

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

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

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 ...

An almost impossible alignment of galaxies that forms a giant magnifying lens could give astronomers an unprecedented deep view of the universe. The Carousel Lens—named for its concentric circular ...

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