Olympus PEN-F

You've got to hand it to Olympus. From the original digital PEN released in 2009 to this 2016 re-imagining in the PEN-F, it certainly knows how to make lovely looking cameras that convincingly marry the analogue and the digital.

More than any digital model from this manufacturer before it, the PEN-F delights in tactile rangefinder-style dials and knobs, located on the top plate, the front and the rear, where they can be readily accessed via fingers and thumbs of both hands. In this respect the camera's handling is similar to the Fujifilm X-Pro2. The Olympus is, however, more compact, portable and less brick-like, while
also being some £300 cheaper.

Nikon Coolpix P900

The Nikon P900 is the largest camera in the test, and is in fact larger than some CSCs and entry-level DSLRs with a kit lens attached. However this size facilitates the huge zoom range of 83x, which the P900 boasts - the longest zoom length currently available on the market at the time of writing.

A large and chunky grip on the front of the camera, along with the large lens makes the camera sit proudly in your hands just as a DSLR would.

Panasonic Lumix FZ1000

The FZ1000 is one of the two cameras here to feature a one-inch sensor, which it couples with a flexible zoom range. It's pretty large and bulky, and with a viewfinder sitting in the middle of the top plate, it's also reminiscent of a DSLR. The grip is substantially chunky, with an indent to help your finger sit particularly comfortably.

Indeed, the dials and button layout on this camera is very reminiscent of something from the G-series CSC range, and are large and well spaced out. There's four customisable function buttons, while dials can also be changed to suit your particular way of working.

Olympus Stylus 1S

The smallest camera on test, the Stylus 1S shares a lot of its looks with the retro-cool Olympus PEN and OM-D, the company's Compact System Cameras. The screen on the back is touch-sensitive, while it tilts to be useful for some awkward-angle shots. You can set the autofocus point with a simple tap. while it's also possible to navigate through menus and so on.

There's also a number of dials and buttons on the camera, many of which can be customised to suit your specific shooting requirements and how you like to work. Because of the camera's small size, the grip is relatively shallow, and it's not as comparable to using a DSLR as the others on test here.

Canon PowerShot G3 X

Canon has a range of five different cameras in its well-respected G-series. The G3 X uses the same sensor as found in G5 X and the G7 X. but a more extensive zoom range and larger body styling places it in prime bridge camera territory. It's also one of the two cameras here that features a one-inch sensor which should translate well for image quality.

The camera itself has a chunky grip, with a textured covering that gives it a sense of quality as well as making it feel secure in the hand. The screen at the rear of the camera tilts, making it useful for a variety of awkward shooting positions. The screen is also touch-sensitive and can be used for a variety of operations, including setting autofocus point, and navigating the quick menu.

Failed stars and super-Jupiters

The brown dwarf is seen as a stellar failure, a dropout from the school of star formation. These gigantic objects with their puffy gaseous outer layers, are the universe's students that didn't quite make the grade. You see, in brown dwarfs, nuclear fusion - the process that gives stars their power - has given up the ghost, leaving them relatively cold and some no hotter than the human body. Neither planet nor star, brown dwarfs fall into the grey area between the most massive gas giant planets like Jupiter (which is why they're known as 'super Jupiters' because of their massive, gaseous nature) and the smallest stars. Their existence blurs the lines between what is a planet and what is a star and forces us to question the differences between how planets and stars form.

Stars form when clouds of molecular gas collapse under gravity and condense until the pressure and temperature at the centre of the collapsing cloud is so great, that nuclear fusion reactions - which turn nuclei of the element hydrogen into the heavier helium nuclei - ignite. This kind of top-down formation is one of the key differences between how stars and planets form. Meanwhile, the worlds of our Solar System and many others that astronomers have been studying over the past 20 years form through a bottom-up process, where a core gradually builds up, becoming bigger and bigger For the most massive planets, the core has enough gravity to begin stealing gas from the proto-stellar nebula around it, and this is where gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn got their hefty atmospheres.

Hidden universe

If we just relied on our eyes, we'd find that we would be blind to most of what the universe has to offer. There would be so much that we would completely miss, from the explosive nature of gamma-ray bursts, to the dusty skeletons of galaxies and even the radiation left behind by the Big Bang. This is because the universe emits light that goes well and truly beyond what our eyes alone can see. Visible light, which is the light that we see making up our everyday surroundings, is just one small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. This runs all the way from low-energy radio waves through to astonishingly high-energy gamma rays. To us, anything that's regarded as outside of the visible part of the spectrum, we just can't see. You might be surprised to learn that we produce this hidden light on Earth too. Think of infrared night vision goggles, the X-rays you might get to see a broken arm with, ultraviolet security tags or radio waves transmitting music and telephone calls across the planet. In space, these other wavelengths of light are everywhere, coming from all kinds of cosmic objects. It's like a hidden universe, but luckily for us, astronomers are able to tune in to these other wavelengths to make the invisible visible.

Light is a funny thing, it is able to act like both a wave and a particle at the same time. This is why we say that a photon of light can have a wavelength. The longest wavelengths are radio waves, which range from a millimetre in length to many kilometres.