On what might have been the proudest day of Jack Burns’s long career in astronomy, he was sitting on a beach. Orbital dynamics and launch schedules wait for no one, and Burns couldn’t move his ...

Nowadays, the dark of night is interspersed with the light of stars. But before the stars were born, did light shine at the beginning of the universe? The short answer is "no." But the long answer ...

A radio signal from the early universe could allow us to understand how everything that surrounds us began. The signal – known as the 21-centimetre signal – could finally let us understand how the ...

So first the Big Bang happens. Everything is incredibly hot and dense; there are photons flying everywhere, but they keep ...