Centauri Dreams

Until we get more assets in orbit around Saturn, we’re left to studying Cassini data on the fascinating moon Enceladus, findings that have already revealed much about geyser activity at the moon’s south polar region and its implications.

Here’s an interesting notion, courtesy of science fiction writer Jack McDevitt.

A research team at the University of Warwick (UK) has turned up what may be a planet orbiting a white dwarf.

One of the things that gives the Fermi paradox its punch is the age of the galaxy.

Given how long stars live in comparison to human lifetimes, I always do a double-take at science fiction tales of starships dropping in to study a nova just as it’s about to go off.

Anthropocentric thinking is a persistent problem when we’re talking about extraterrestrial civilizations.

Launching a flagship-class mission like the Roman Space Telescope is always exciting, but with Roman in space, let’s also keep an eye on Pandora, a smaller though fascinating NASA mission (through its Astrophysics Pioneers program) that is now beginning i…

The question of when to launch an interstellar mission has occupied us many times in the past.

We’ll have a lot to talk about when observations from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope start coming in.

With New Horizons now 63 AU out, it’s time to ponder that record hibernation period that the spacecraft just went through.

We’ve yet to find any evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth, a puzzling failure given the widespread belief that where habitable planets exist, life will somehow emerge.

Thinking about a great filter through which a civilization must pass before its survival is assured usually leads to catastrophic scenarios, such as planetary suicide by nuclear war, or climate holocaust (assuming the filter lies ahead of us and not behin…

If we couldn’t figure out what to call CD-35 2722B b, which I assume is the correct way to refer to the planet-sized object in this red dwarf / brown dwarf/ gas giant system, another planet has a bit of a definitional problem as well.

Problems of definition will long be with us as we take ever closer looks at exoplanets.

Building the infrastructure we will need for interstellar exploration requires an imaginative look at today’s technologies as applied to distant targets.

Self-replicating probes continue to be a controversial subject, just as they were when Frank Tipler up the ante on Michael Hart by invoking them as a way of further tightening the tension of the Fermi Paradox.