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A massive black hole - about 20,000 times the size of the sun - has been confirmed as the closest to our solar system by an international study involving University of Queensland researchers. This discovery validates decades of speculation about the black hole's existence, which the team found at the centre of the neighbouring star cluster Omega Centauri in the Milky Way, about 18,000 light-years from our solar system.

Up to 60% of near-Earth objects could be dark comets, mysterious asteroids that orbit the sun in our solar system that likely contain or previously contained ice and could have been one route for delivering water to Earth, according to a University of Michigan study.

Research into a rare planet is revealing the link between hot Jupiter-sized exoplanets and cold solar system giants like Saturn. Astronomers searching for exoplanets (planets outside of our solar system) have investigated a Saturn-sized body around a Sun-like star, 490 lightyears from Earth. The research, led by The University of Warwick in collaboration with other global institutions, focused on a transiting exoplanet called TOI-2447 b, which is much cooler and further away from its host star than most known exoplanets.

Investigations with participation by Heidelberg scientists show that later emerging small bodies brought water to the Earth Age data for certain classes of meteorite have made it possible to gain new findings on the origin of small water-rich astronomical bodies in the early solar system. These so-called planetesimals continually supplied building materials for planets - also for the Earth, whose original material contained little water.

Researchers Marcos Fernández (left) and Jesús Gimeno in front of one of the lunar soil simulations.

A team of astronomers from UdeM has made an exciting discovery about the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140 b: it could be a promising "super-Earth" covered in ice or water. When the exoplanet LHS 1140 b was first discovered, astronomers speculated that it might be a mini-Neptune: an essentially gaseous planet, but very small in size compared to Neptune.

A team of CNRS planetary scientists 1 working in collaboration with astronomers from the University of Montréal has presented first evidence that the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140b could be an ocean world. Over the past few years, the planet, which is located around 48 light-years from the Solar System in the constellation Cetus, has been observed by the Hubble, Spitzer and TESS space telescopes, as well as by the ESPRESSO instrument mounted on the VLT telescope in Chile.

Stench of a gas giant? Nearby exoplanet reeks of rotten eggs. And that's a good thing. Johns Hopkins astronomers sniffed out the stinky atmosphere with Webb Telescope An exoplanet infamous for its deadly weather has been hiding another bizarre feature-it reeks of rotten eggs, according to a new Johns Hopkins University study of data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

An antenna on ExoMars' Trace Gas Orbiter has been given a new lease of life, helping researchers delve into the Martian atmosphere like never before. Using the repurposed equipment, a team including Imperial College London researchers have measured parts of the Martian atmosphere that were previously impossible to probe.

The findings could unlock the most accurate clock ever and allow advances like deep space navigation, communication Science + Technology The findings could unlock the most accurate clock ever and allow advances like deep space navigation, communication Key takeaways Raising the energy state of an atom's nucleus using a laser, or exciting it, would enable development of the most accurate atomic clocks ever to exist.

A team of astrophysicists led by Caltech has managed for the first time to simulate the journey of primordial gas dating from the early universe to the stage at which it becomes swept up in a disk of material fueling a single supermassive black hole. The new computer simulation upends ideas about such disks that astronomers have held since the 1970s and paves the way for new discoveries about how black holes and galaxies grow and evolve.

Study provides new insights into the gravitational interactions between colliding black holes and answers to fundamental questions in physics. Under the leadership of Jan Plefka from the Department of Physics at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU), an international team has described the dynamics of colliding black holes with unprecedented mathematical precision.

An international team of researchers combine orbital imagery with seismological data from NASA's Mars InSight lander to derive a new impact rate for meteorite strikes on Mars. Seismology also offers a new tool for determining the density of Mars' craters and the age of different regions of a planet.

A massive balloon, designed to measure the background radiation left over from the 'Big Bang' and help scientists better understand the infancy and evolution of our Universe, has just moved to the next stage of development Thirty years after the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) spectrum was first precisely characterised by NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission, a new experiment - known as BISOU (for Balloon Interferometer for Spectral Observations of the Universe) - is expected to significantly advance these measurements, gaining a factor of ~25 in sensitivity.

An international team has shown the existence of two distinct populations of sub-Neptunes, resolving a debate in the scientific community. The majority of stars in our galaxy are home to planets. The most abundant are the sub-Neptunes, planets between the size of Earth and Neptune. Calculating their density poses a problem for scientists: depending on the method used to measure their mass, two populations are highlighted, the dense and the less dense.

Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century's most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer. Astronomers from the University of Glasgow have used statistical modelling techniques developed to analyse gravitational waves to establish the likely number of holes in one of the broken rings of the Antikythera mechanism - an ancient artifact which was showcased in the movie Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny .

A Canadian team led by René Doyon will help design and build the ANDES spectrograph, which will search for signs of life outside the solar system. In 2014, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) began construction of the world's largest telescope, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), in Chile's Atacama Desert, 3,000 metres above sea level.

For the last seven decades, astrophysicists have theorized the existence of "kugelblitze," black holes caused by extremely high concentrations of light. These special black holes, they speculated, might be linked to astronomical phenomena such as dark matter, and have even been suggested as the power source of hypothetical spaceship engines in the far future.

A team of researchers including French scientists from the CNRS, Université Grenoble Alpes, and the Observatoire de Paris-PSL 1 have for the first time ever observed brown dwarfs orbiting very near bright stars-a feat for precise astronomical imaging. Out of the eight companions 2 imaged, the researchers determined that five were brown dwarfs, substellar celestial objects that are still poorly understood, neither stars nor planets but something in between.

Science + Technology Fragments from the early cosmos help unravel the mystery of our solar system's birth Key takeaways Iron meteorites are remnants of the metallic cores of the earliest asteroids in our solar system. Iron meteorites contain refractory metals, such as iridium and platinum, that formed near the sun but were transported to the outer solar system.