Forever curious. Always looking up.
Posted on 8th Aug 2025
Remember Project Hyperion? In case you have priorities other than staying current on all the most obscure space and astronomy news from around the world, here's a quick recap. It's a theoretical study by the members of the Initiative for Interstellar Studies (i4is) to explore the design of a crewe...
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...
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
The International Space Station is really starting to show its age. It's a bit leaky these days, particularly on the Russian side. The Zvezda module had had a worsening air leak since 2019. It's bad enough that the US think it could lead to a catastrophic failure, which, maybe... It is a signifi...
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...
Science is a team sport, and curiosity loves company. Got feedback, a question, or just want to say hi? Share your love of science and tell us all about it here.
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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