Posts in Category: Astronomy
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
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...
Posted on 27th Jun 2025
It's here. I’ve been harping on about this for a while now. I was so looking forward to it that one of my 2024 things to look forward to was that we'd be one year closer to first light. I'm talking about the Vera C. Rubin Observatory of course, and it has not disappointed. The first images, commis...
Posted on 27th Jun 2025
I’m fascinated by cosmology. What's not to love? It's the science of the origin and evolution of the universe and its ultimate fate. And the great thing is you can kind of figure a lot of it out by assuming the Big Bang happened and just working forward from there. One of the bits of evidence...
Posted on 13th Jun 2025
Titan is an interesting place. It's the largest moon of Saturn, bigger than our Moon and bigger even than the planet Mercury. It's also the only place besides Earth in the solar system with a dense atmosphere and standing bodies of liquid on its surface. Yes, Titan has rivers, lakes, and seas which...
Posted on 30th May 2025
In the outer solar system, beyond all the planets, there’s a lot of stuff. Small rocky and icy objects orbit the sun at enormous distances. But strangely there’s a group of these objects that seem to be clustered together. Now, the use of the word 'clustered' might imply that these objects are close...
Posted on 7th Feb 2025
Psyche is the mission to the asteroid 16 Psyche – a piece of space rock that is supposedly worth $100k quadrillion. Or, depending which media report you read today, it might be a billion quadrillion dollars, or even a trillion quadrillion dollars. At this point these numbers don’t even mean anyth...
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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