News & articles

Three projects involving The Open University’s space scientists will share a close to £500,000 slice of the UK Government’s latest investment in the British space industry.

OU space science researchers are part of a consortium which has received €1M funding to develop a payload concept to extract oxygen from Moon rock.

An OU academic has launched a survey to collect the experiences of women and people who have had early pregnancy endings while working.

An OU PhD student has launched the first-ever research platform to capture the particular intersection of misogyny and racial oppression experienced by Black women online: “Misogynoir”.

From CSI to Law and Order, Line of Duty and Midsomer Murders, there is huge public fascination with crime and the criminal justice system. Especially when things come to a climactic ending and jurors decide on a defendent’s fate. But how much do jurors get it wrong? Will the jury convict an innocent person, or might they free a guilty person?

Since astronomers discovered the first planet orbiting a star other than the Sun, we have found many worlds that are very unlike the ones in our own Solar System.

Free speech is the right to express one’s opinions without censorship or restraint. It is a cornerstone of modern liberal democracies. Nowadays, it is considered a basic right in the UN’s 1948 Declaration of Human Rights and it is is enshrined in British law.

This is not a bad dream version of recent climate change headlines. This is the dark vision in the 50-year-old dystopian novel, The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner. A British author, Brunner was one of a handful of writers who were early advocates of environmental activism.

Astronomers famously snapped the first ever direct image of a black hole in 2019, thanks to material glowing in its presence. But many black holes are actually near impossible to detect. Now another team using the Hubble Space Telescope seems to have finally found something nobody has seen before: a black hole which is completely invisible.

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) has awarded OU space researchers close to £175,000 to develop a one of a kind construction method that could one day enable us to build on the Moon from lunar soil.