Space

In the past I have predicted certain things at the start of certain years.  This is a selection of those which I recall, along with issues I am watching out for the next year.  They include…

The Universe is very large, and we are very small compared to it, not only in size. Creating a cosmology that attempts to explain the whole existing Universe is an obsession shared by all cultures.…

How can you as a person who is not a scientist know if a given claim of having found alien life is valid?  In 2014 I used the planet Kepler 186f as an object for discussing this very question.…

Astronomers have speculated that black holes eat slowly. A recent paper argues that their computer simulation shows just the opposite.  Don't get too excited, this is still a computer simulation…

One of the things that keeps me busy these days is the organization of a collective publication by a number of experts in artificial intelligence and top researchers in all areas of scientific…

Stars die in lots of ways. Most low-mass stars like our Sun shed their outer layers and eventually fade to white dwarf stars. Larger ones prefer to burn out rather than fade away so they go…

There has been a lot of talk recently of Betelgeuse possibly going supernova this century or not long after.  The basis of this is a paper referenced in this article: Betelgeuse is almost 50%…

Astronomers at the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered six massive “Universe breaker” galaxies that existed just 500 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. These galaxies, larger…

Saturn’s rings are one of the jewels of the solar system, but it seems that their time is short and their existence fleeting. A new study suggests the rings are between 400 million and 100 million…

Direct imaging of a gas giant is not totally new. What is new is the combination of direct imaging with an indirect method that allows better understanding of the mass of gas giants in other solar…