Senior Science Correspondent
Rafael Alvarez
Rafael covers astronomy, physics, and the instruments that make discovery possible. He has reported from observatories on four continents.
Latest by Rafael
5 total
Space
A telescope just captured the birth of a solar system
The sharpest image yet of a protoplanetary disk taking shape around a young star.
Jun 12, 2026 · 4 min
Astronomy
Astronomers have found the most distant known object
Light from the newly catalogued galaxy left it 300 million years after the Big Bang.
May 22, 2026 · 7 min
Astrophysics
Black holes at the centre of everything
Every large galaxy appears to have one. The question is no longer whether they exist — it's what they're doing to the galaxies around them.
May 5, 2026 · 8 min
Space
The James Webb telescope — one year of impossible images
What a year of data from the most powerful observatory ever built has done to our picture of the universe.
Jun 25, 2026 · 9 min
Cosmology
The telescope that keeps finding galaxies too old to exist
Every new deep field pushes the first galaxies earlier — and forces cosmologists to ask whether the standard model of the universe is missing something fundamental.
July 1, 2026 · 11 min