Institute of Astronomy

News and Press Releases

Astronomers observe light bending around an isolated white dwarf

Published on 15/02/2023 

Astronomers have directly measured the mass of a dead star using an effect known as gravitational microlensing, first predicted by Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity, and first observed by two Cambridge astronomers 100 years ago.

More clues to understand our early Universe

Published on 30/01/2023 

An array of 350 radio telescopes in the Karoo desert of South Africa is getting closer to detecting “the Epoch of Re-ionization” &

UK-led robotic sky scanner reveals its first galactic fingerprint

Published on 13/12/2022 

A major telescope upgrade has peered through to the distant Universe to reveal the spectra of a pair of galaxies 280 million light years away from Earth.

The spectra provide a first glimpse of the sky from the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE) – a unique upgrade to the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) in La Palma on the Canary Islands.

Non-detection of key signal allows astronomers to determine what the first galaxies were – and weren’t – like

Published on 05/12/2022 

Researchers have been able to make some key determinations about the first galaxies to exist, in one of the first astrophysical studies of the period in the early Universe when the first stars and galaxies formed, known as the cosmic dawn.

 

Using data from India’s SARAS3 radio telescope, researchers led by the University of Cambridge were able to look at the very early Universe – just 200 million years after the Big Bang – and place limits on the mass and energy output of the first stars and galaxies. 

 

Study of ‘polluted’ white dwarfs finds that stars and planets grow together

Published on 23/11/2022 

 

A team of astronomers have found that planet formation in our young Solar System started much earlier than previously thought, with the building blocks of planets growing at the same time as their parent star.