“Today is not your first arrival here.” — Hongzhi Zhengjue, 1091-1157 CE Astrobiology is rewiring our understanding of the intimate connection between life and planets as they appear in the universe. By Adam Frank Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are… Read More The Coming Second Copernican Revolution
Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer’s film Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds (2020) takes viewers on an extraordinary journey to discover how shooting stars, meteorites, and deep space impacts have focused the human imagination on other realms and worlds, and on our past and our future. In Clive’s words (responding to Brother Guy Consolmagno of the… Read More ‘Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds’
Shobhit Mahajan Hindustan Times, 14th April, 2024. In the Particle zoo of elementary particles which make up our universe, there is only one particle named after a person. Peter Higgs, after whom the eponymous Higgs boson is named, passed away recently at age 94 in Edinburgh. Almost exactly 60 years ago, Higgs proposed a mechanism… Read More The Atheist Scientist who discovered the ‘God Particle’
In the early 1930s, the Indian-born physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-95), who was then studying at the University of Cambridge in the UK, proposed that not all stars become white dwarves at the end of their lifecycle. Instead, the brilliant young scientist argued, when stars were of a certain mass, they would form something denser than… Read More The Indian astronomer whose innovative work on black holes was mocked at Cambridge
And behold / The blue planet steeped in its dream / Of reality, its calculated vision shaking with the only love – James Dickey If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our… Read More Pale Blue Dot
First posted June 30, 2015 The Old Astronomer to His Pupil Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, I would know him when we meet,When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of howWe are working to completion, working on from then to… Read More The Old Astronomer to His Pupil / Stunning New Footage Of Earth
Before the beginning of the 19th Century, when Paris became the first city in Europe to use gas lighting to illuminate its streets, the sight of the Milky Way was as commonplace as the sight of the Moon. But in recent decades, light pollution has become so intense that many people rarely get to admire… Read More Astrophysicist and photographer Jordi Busqué shares photos of the night’s sky that transcend the boundaries of science
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed colorful new portraits of the iconic Ring Nebula. Smithsonian Magazine The new images capture the complex details of the planetary nebula, an enormous cloud of cosmic gas and dust that’s home to the remnants of a dying star. The two images were taken in different wavelengths of infrared… Read More Ring Nebula in unprecedented detail
Stargazers across the world were treated to a bigger and brighter full Moon than usual on Tuesday night. This month’s full Moon, dubbed the Sturgeon Moon, lit up the night’s sky as it rose above the horizon shortly after sunset. It’s the first of two supermoons this month – the next full moon on 30… Read More Supermoon pictures from around the world
An exotic green comet that has not passed Earth since the time of the Neanderthals has reappeared in the sky ready for its closest approach to the planet next week. Discovered last March by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was calculated to orbit the… Read More Exotic green comet not seen since stone age returns to skies above Earth
After the truth-shower 