Post of the month: jul 2025
Browse our most recent analyses and observations — from orbital mechanics to propulsion systems, we cover the successes, the failures, and all the moments that make you pause and think, “Sure… but why?”
Posted on 25th Jul 2025
Dark energy – the stuff causing the Universe to expand at an accelerating rate – makes up about 68% of the Universe. It's thought to be a cosmological constant, a single value of something like \(10^{-52}\) \(\mathrm{m^{-2}}\), and it's baked right into our best model of the Universe1. But...
Posted on 25th Jul 2025
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is quietly revolutionising astronomy, photographing the early Universe, and breaking records for its new discoveries every other week. For example, just a month or so ago it broke the record for finding the oldest galaxy humans have ever laid eyes on. Again. B...
Posted on 25th Jul 2025
You might not have noticed, but July 22 of this year was the second shortest day on record. On July 5 just a couple of weeks before that we experienced the shortest day. And Aug 5 is set to be another day clocking in at under 24 hours in length. But to be clear, none of this is perceptible to huma...
Posted on 11th Jul 2025
Remember NASA's DART mission? That was the one that played out like a reenactment of the movie Armageddon. You know, train a bunch of good-looking people to be astronauts, and then send them out to divert an asteroid heading for Earth. Great premise for a sci-fi movie, but there's a lot more ficti...
Posted on 11th Jul 2025
Whenever we talk about dark matter, the conversation includes a fair amount of uncertainty. For one thing, there are competing theories that question the very existence of dark matter. For another, we've been looking for it for decades and have come up with precisely nothing. Dark matter is though...
Being almost the holidays, this might be a good time to talk about space tourism. Let’s ignore the advertising of well-known rocket launch companies and...
The hybrid solar eclipse in Exmouth a couple of weeks ago was a pretty rare event, but to the surprise of no-one it was predicted...
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