Latest news and comment

Professor Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has been appointed Companion of Honour in the King’s Birthday Honours List 2025 for her services to astronomy and physics and to diversity.

We work among extraordinary people doing extraordinary things; get to know some of them by reading these quick-fire interviews.

Scientists could turn to black holes to complement facilities searching for dark matter and similarly elusive particles that hold clues to the universe’s deepest secrets, a new study by Oxford researchers suggests.

A consortium across six UK universities has been awarded an STFC Astronomy Large Award to fund their work analysing data from the Simons Observatory; Professor David Alonso explains how it could shed light on dark matter, dark energy and the Big Bang.

Breakthrough Listen is partnering with ASTRON, the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, and the University of Manchester, to deploy a new all-sky monitor at the Westerbork Observatory in the Netherlands.

Ten new Fellows have joined the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship programme at the University of Oxford, two of whom will be joining the Department of Physics.

New data from a satellite one million miles from Earth has helped UK scientists shed light on how mysterious forces shaped the evolution of the Universe.

An international team of astrophysicists led by the Netherlands and the UK have discovered that radio pulses lasting seconds to minutes are due to two stars coming together – rather than emissions from a single star.

A team of international researchers including Dr Jake Taylor from the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, has used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to explore the exotic atmosphere of LTT 9779 b, a rare ‘ultra-hot Neptune’.

Professor Stephen Smartt, Wetton Professor of Astrophysics, comments on the latest talk of an asteroid headed for impact…

An international team has confirmed the discovery of a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone of a nearby Sun-like star. The planet was originally detected two years ago by Oxford University scientist Dr Michael Cretignier.

Dr Boon Kok Tan is a senior researcher in astrophysics of the Department of Physics. His ERC research project aims to advance ultra-sensitive instrumentation for microwave, millimetre (mm), sub-mm, and terahertz (THz) frequencies.