This week marks 48 years since the Sept. 5, 1977, launch of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to study Jupiter and Saturn up close. Nearly a half-century later, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2 are still exploring. Only now they’re in the outer reaches of our solar system.

Ireland’s first satellite, EIRSAT-1, has completed its mission orbiting Earth. The CubeSat, which was built and launched by students and faculty of University College Dublin (UCD), will de-orbit in a day or two.

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, has been called the most precise ruler in the world for its ability to measure motions more than 10,000 times smaller than the width of a proton. By making these extremely precise measurements, LIGO, which consists of two facilities—one in Washington and one in Louisiana—can detect undulations in space-time called gravitational waves that roll outward from colliding cosmic bodies such as black holes.

Scientists have discovered a giant black hole that they believe may have been formed in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. The black hole is so huge that it may change our understanding of how these cosmic giants form. If the findings are confirmed, this will be the first evidence of primordial black holes, which were predicted to exist by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s.

One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change over time. For example, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the early universe might appear one way to our modern telescopes, but the same supermassive black hole might appear completely differently a few billion years later.