Intervals I May 2026

The centre of our Milky Way galaxy is a mysterious place. Not only is it thousands of light-years away, it’s also cloaked in so much dust that most stars within are rendered invisible. Harvard researchers are proposing a new way to clear the fog and spot stars hiding there. They suggest looking for radio waves coming from supersonic stars.

Putting general relativity to the test, astronomers compared the known gravity of a galaxy with the bending of spacetime needed to produce a spectacular ‘Einstein ring’ and found, once again, that Einstein was correct.

A glancing collision between two galaxies in the distant past triggered a firestorm of starbirth in the smaller of the two, leaving one side relatively intact while the other was set ablaze by gravitational stresses.