Skywatching
Finding the stuff of life
Earth was born about 4.5 billion years ago, along with the Sun and all the other bodies making up the Solar System. Since living things appeared on Earth pretty...
2 full moons in October
It was a dark and stormy night. The full moon stared through the scudding clouds and the bare tree branches. It seems in almost all the spooky movies on TV...
How old is that star?
We're a funny species. On one side we try to set up standard ways of referring to things, so that people around the world, working in other disciplines,...
A near miss - in 1908?
The old, black-and-white pictures show men up to their knees in mud and water, making measurements with theodolites and other instruments, with their heads...
Close encounter with Mars
"No one would have believed, at the end of the 19th Century, that human affairs were being watched by ..... intellects vast, and cool and unsympathetic,...
Pulse of the universe
Long ago, in a galaxy 3.6 billion light years away, something strange happened. Whatever it was produced a short pulse of radio waves about a thousandth of a...
Life after stellar death
We hear, occasionally, of someone proposing what looks at first sight like a really improbable project. The latest one is an experiment to detect signs of life...
Creatures in the sky
I f you have ever spent a summer night by a beaver pond or boggy area, you may have seen brief, greenish-white flickering flames. If so, you have seen...
Holes in space
Black holes are distortions in the fabric of space-time produced by intense gravitational fields. This distortions are "closed,” meaning nothing, not...
Your core is nuclear waste
At the bottom of the deep ocean there is a never-ending snowfall of particles. Some come from rivers, bringing eroded material from the land. There is dust from...
What's the date?
We take knowing the date for granted. It comes up on our computer screens, on our phones, in our diaries and appointment books, and lots of other places. We...
Reading the Sun's biography
The window in my den faces east. On the windowsill, I have a prism, a piece of glass around eight centimetres long and triangular in cross-section. It is...
Dancing close to the sun
Almost all the solar information we have is either acquired from instruments located on Earth, or in near-Earth space. This raises two issues. We are too far...
Living on Mars
At some point in the next decade or two, one of us is going to plant a space-suited foot on the surface of Mars and make that first footprint. However, that...
Planet still missing
In the 18th Century, Johann Bode and Johann Titius came up with a strange procedure for predicting where to look for planets. It seems more like a numbers game...
The world that never was
Neptune was the first planet discovered by detecting and measuring deviations of known planets from the predicted orbits. From these measurements astronomers...
Hairy star passing through
Through binoculars, a few nights ago comet NEOWISE looked like a blurry star that had been smeared upward by the artist before the paint was dry. At 3:45 a.m.,...
The search for planets
How we managed to discover planets orbiting other stars is quite a story. Actually, how we came to find the planets in our own Solar System is an interesting...
How can we be alone?
The latest estimate is that there are around six billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy alone. However, when we really dig into the issue regarding what makes...
Star will collapse, explode
In science and technology, we are now fairly used to the idea of achieving things today that were unthinkable even a few years ago. This applies to astronomy,...