Far far away in the constellation Cancer there is a 14th magnitude speck of light one can claim in a 10-inch or larger telescope. Essentially this tiny speck represents the final farewell of chewed up stars as their remains whirl down the throat of an 18 billion solar mass black hole, one of the largest known in the universe.

The successor to the Hubble Space Telescope is reaching some key milestones in its preparation for launch in 2018.

It will be possible to see all the five bright planets align together in the sky for the first time in more than a decade.

Despite the fact that we experience time in one direction- we get older, we have records and remember the past, but no record of the future-no laws of physics insists that time must move forward. When the Big Bang created our universe, physicists believe it also created an inverse mirror universe where time moves in an opposite direction.

A musician combines the logarithmic maps of the universe from Princeton and images from NASA to create an image showing the observable universe in one disc.

The universe really is weird, which is bad news both for Albert Einstein and for would-be hackers hoping to break into quantum encryption systems. Eighty years after the physicist dismissed as "spooky" the idea that simply observing one particle could instantly change another far-away object, Dutch scientists said on Wednesday they had proved decisively that the effect was real.

A space telescope designed to look into the furthest-most reaches of space at some of the most energetic phenomena in the known universe has, once again, been turned to face our nearest star, producing a rare and beautiful insight to our X-ray sun.

Scientists say they have found the brightest quasar yet in the early universe, a region around a supermassive black hole that blazes with the brightness of 420 trillion suns