... mosphere. The bolide is estimated to have come from the south-east, travelling at a speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph). The explosion, which flattened tens of millions of trees over an area of more than 2000 sq km (830 sq miles), was equivalent to t ...

Artwork depicting a so-called micronova. This is an entirely new phenomenon in astrophysics, reported by astronomers at the University of Durham in the UK. They are highly explosive events that occur in a subsclass of cataclysmic binaries called inte...

Artwork conceptualising the expanding and accelerating Universe. Since the 1990s, astronomers have known that the Universe is not only expanding, but that the rate of expansion itself is accelerating. This is postulated to occur due to a mysterious d...

Stages in the history of the Universe after the Big Bang. At 300,000 years, matter and radiation decouple, and the Universe becomes transparent for the first time. The first galaxies form at around 300 million years after the Big Bang, but the exact ...

Stages in the history of the Universe after the Big Bang. At 300,000 years, matter and radiation decouple, and the Universe becomes transparent for the first time. The first galaxies form at around 300 million years after the Big Bang, but the exact ...

Stages in the history of the Universe after the Big Bang. At 300,000 years, matter and radiation decouple, and the Universe becomes transparent for the first time. The first galaxies form at around 300 million years after the Big Bang, but the exact ...

Artwork depicting a cataclysmic astronomical even called a fast blue optical transient (FBOT). These are epic explosions on a par with supernovae, kilonovae or gamma-ray bursts, but their rise to maximum brightness and their subsequent decline are mu...

Artwork depicting a cataclysmic astronomical even called a fast blue optical transient (FBOT). These are epic explosions on a par with supernovae, kilonovae or gamma-ray bursts, but their rise to maximum brightness and their subsequent decline are mu...

A large meteor crashes through the Earth's atmosphere and explodes above the surface, leaving no crater. A similar event is thought to have happened in Tunguska in 1908. However, in this case, while the explosion occurred above the ground, the shock ...