Mark Thompson

Science broadcaster and author. Mark is known for his tireless enthusiasm for making science accessible, through numerous tv, radio, podcast and theatre appearances, and books. He was a part of the award-nominated BBC Stargazing LIVE TV Show in the UK and his Spectacular Science theatre show has received 5 star reviews across UK theatres. In 2025 he is launching his new podcast Cosmic Commerce and is working on a new book 101 Facts You Didn't Know About Deep Space In 2018, Mark received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of East Anglia.

You can email Mark here

Recent Articles

The Quiet Conversation Between Muscle and Gravity, and What Happens When It Stops

July 01, 2026

Every muscle in the human body is, in a sense, in constant conversation with gravity, sensing load and responding accordingly to stay strong. Remove that conversation, as happens to astronauts in orbit, and the consequences unfold at a molecular level long before they become visible. New NASA-supported research is tracing exactly how that breakdown happens, using a purpose-built model that mimics weightlessness here on Earth. The surprising twist is where else this knowledge might apply
A Star’s Death Throes Involves a Lot of Kicking

July 01, 2026

When stars like the Sun reach the end of their lives, the textbook story has them puffing up and quietly shedding their outer layers to leave a white dwarf behind. A new model suggests it is far less serene than that. As dying stars eject mass asymmetrically, each burst delivers a tiny recoil, and over hundreds of thousands of years roughly ten thousand of these kicks add up to send the star drifting through space at a respectable speed. The idea neatly explains why wide binary star systems tend to fall apart once one star becomes a white dwarf, and it hints at something more dramatic still waiting to be confirmed
Galaxy Groups Hiding in the Universe’s Emptiest Places

July 01, 2026

Even the universe’s emptiest regions, the vast voids that make up most of the volume of space, are not entirely empty. A new study using the CAVITY survey hunts for galaxy groups hiding within these voids, applying a friends of friends technique to chart how nearby galaxies cluster together despite the surrounding emptiness. The results paint a striking picture that most void galaxies actually live entirely solitary lives, yet where groups do form, they are small, loose and curiously indifferent to just how empty their void actually is. It raises a deceptively simple question that turns out to be anything but: in the universe’s quietest neighbourhoods, what makes some galaxies choose company while most remain alone?
The Dead Stars That Won't Fade Quietly

June 30, 2026

The wreckage of an exploded star is meant to fade quietly, cooling over thousands of years like the embers of a fire. So astronomers were stunned when NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory caught dozens of these supernova remnants in a nearby galaxy doing the opposite, flaring and flickering in X-rays as though refusing to die. In each case a star appears to have survived its partner's explosion, only to be slowly devoured by the black hole or neutron star its companion left behind. It’s a discovery that turns the calm graveyards of dead stars into something far stranger and more alive.
The Black Holes That Burp Years After They Eat

June 29, 2026

When a star strays too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart in a brief, brilliant flare, and astronomers long assumed that was the end of the story. It isn't. Using the Very Large Array to follow dozens of these stellar killings, a team has discovered that many black holes "burp" months or even years later, belching out streams of radio light as they fling part of their meal back into space. These delayed flares let astronomers watch a black hole's appetite change in real time, and reveal that even our Galaxy's quietest looking giants are messier, and far more active, than anyone realised.
An Island of Calm at the Violent Heart of the Galaxy

June 29, 2026

The centre of the Milky Way is one of the most violent places in the Galaxy, a churning storm of gas moving faster than sound, and about the last spot you would expect a star to be born. Yet astronomers mapping that chaos with the ALMA telescope have stumbled on a hidden pocket of calm, where the gas slows, settles and quietly begins gathering itself into the seeds of new stars. The find suggests stars may take their first steps the same way everywhere, even here, and that our own Sun was likely born from just such an island of stillness, billions of years ago.
Two Planets Lighter Than Candy Floss

June 29, 2026

Astronomers have found two of the lightest worlds ever discovered, a pair of giant planets so wispy that, gram for gram, they are less dense than candy floss. Each is roughly the size of Jupiter yet holds almost nothing inside and the two circle the same distant star as siblings, locked in a gravitational dance that sees them tug one another off schedule as they orbit. It was observations from the depths of the Antarctic winter, that let astronomers weigh them and uncover just how astonishingly insubstantial they are. Now they want to know just how a planet ends up barely heavier than air at all.
Listening to the One Place That Swallows Everything

June 28, 2026

The event horizon of a black hole should be impossible to study. It’s the point of no return, the boundary where gravity grows so strong that not even light can escape, so by definition nothing can carry word of it back to us. Yet a team of scientists have found a way to reach it and found a hidden signal, a faint trace, never read before, carrying information from the very edge of the horizon in the instant before it formed. From it they measured the new black hole's spin and surface gravity, and opened a fresh way to test whether Einstein's theory survives in the most extreme gravity there is.
Astronomers Catch the Glowing Shockwave of a Galaxy on the Move

June 26, 2026

Astronomers have discovered a galaxy so unlike anything in the textbooks that the researcher who found it, after 25 years studying these objects, says he has never seen its equal. Named RAD-BAARG, it is falling supersonically into a distant cluster of galaxies and ploughing up a glowing arc of radio plasma nearly 1.8 million light years across, shaped uncannily like a bow and arrow. It offers astronomers their clearest view yet of a bow shock, a structure long predicted but almost never glimpsed. And in a final twist, the first person to spot it was not a professional at all, but a student combing through telescope data from a remote hillside in the Himalayas.
How NASA Taught Four Astronauts to Read the Moon

June 26, 2026

When Artemis II swept around the far side of the Moon this April, carrying the first humans beyond Earth orbit in more than fifty years, NASA had prepared its four astronauts for something more than flying the spacecraft. It had trained them to see. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen spent two years learning to read the Moon like field geologists, hunting through impact rocks in Labrador and volcanic ash in Iceland, so that when they finally gazed down on the terrain, they could describe its colours, shadows and history with a scientist's judgement. It’s a quiet revolution in what we send astronauts to the Moon to do, and a glimpse of how the next explorers will work when they finally land.
The Galaxy That Cleared the Fog

June 25, 2026

For its first billion years the universe was lost in fog, a thick haze of hydrogen that swallowed light whole. Something burned it away, and astronomers have long wondered what. Now Hubble has caught a tiny, furious galaxy in the very act of clearing the murk, glimpsed as it was just 1.4 billion years after the big bang. It may be the smoking gun for how the universe first became clear.
A Star Dying by the Wrong Rules

June 25, 2026

Half the stars in the universe live in pairs and when one of them dies it can feed hungrily off the other in a slow, violent dance. Now a Korean team has caught a couple of stars breaking the rules, locked in an orbit so impossibly fast that our best theories of how stars grow old cannot account for it. So what is this dying star trying to tell us?
The Galaxy Living Too Fast

June 25, 2026

Twelve million light years away, a galaxy is living fast and burning bright, forging new stars ten times quicker than our own Milky Way in a frenzy that cannot possibly last. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has cut clean through its veil of dust to count an astonishing 16.5 million of its stars, one by one. So what is driving the Cigar Galaxy to burn so furiously?
Why Consciousness Might Not Belong to Us Alone

June 15, 2026

We have spent centuries being knocked off our pedestal. Earth isn't the centre of the Solar System, the Sun isn't the centre of the Galaxy, and we are not the point around which everything else turns. Now two philosophers want to take the demotion one step further and apply it to the thing we hold most precious of all, our own conscious minds. If they're right, awareness may be far more widespread, and far stranger, than we ever dared imagine.
The Little Red Dots That Turned Out to Be Black Holes in Disguise

June 15, 2026

For three years they've been one of the strangest puzzles in astronomy. Tiny, mysterious red dots scattered across the early universe, so abundant and so bright that some researchers wondered if they had "broken" cosmology itself. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed look yet at one of them, and the answer it reveals is as exotic as the name suggests: a star sized object that is, in fact, a black hole wearing a disguise.
The Galaxy's Spin Is Hiding in the Hum of Gravitational Waves

June 15, 2026

We are used to thinking of gravitational waves as messengers from catastrophes in space, the ringing of spacetime after black holes collide for example. But our own Galaxy hums with a fainter, steadier signal, a chorus of millions of unseen binary stars. A new study has found that this hum carries a hidden fingerprint of the Milky Way's spin, and that if a future space mission ignores it, our picture of the Galaxy itself could come out subtly wrong.
FAST Finds a Pulsar in an Almost Flawless Circular Orbit

June 15, 2026

Somewhere in the plane of the Milky Way, a dead star is spinning 220 times a second, and it's circling its companion in almost the most perfect orbit astronomers have ever measured. China's giant FAST radio telescope has just found it, and the shape of that orbit is a near flawless record of a billion year relationship between two stars.
The Universe is Still Running Away From Us

June 12, 2026

Last year, a study sent a quiet tremor through the field of cosmology. A team of researchers claimed that the universe's expansion might be slowing down, not speeding up, suggesting that dark energy, the mysterious force thought to be driving the cosmos apart, could be weakening. If true, it would have shaken the foundations of our understanding of the universe. Now, a new study including two Nobel laureates has looked carefully at the evidence and reached a clear verdict - crisis averted.
The Smallest Window on the Sun

June 12, 2026

Every so often, the Sun hurls billions of tonnes of charged particles toward Earth in what are called coronal mass ejections and if a big one hits at the wrong moment, the consequences for satellites, power grids, and communications systems could be catastrophic. Our best defence is to predict them before they happen, and that means watching the Sun's magnetic fields constantly and precisely. Now, a component smaller than a shirt button could transform how we do exactly that.
Reading the Galaxy's Past

June 12, 2026

Every galaxy you've ever seen in a photograph is hiding something. Beyond the glowing disc of stars and gas that the camera captures lies a vast, ghostly outer region called a halo, too faint to see easily but packed with clues about how that galaxy came to be. ESA has just formally committed to a mission designed to reveal those hidden haloes in unprecedented detail, and in doing so, finally answer one of the most fundamental questions in astronomy: how did galaxies like our own Milky Way form?