After a relatively long hiatus, I am back blogging. I am currently more than 22 posts behind my “post every day” goal, so expect some short and sweet posts to make up the difference. I’m not worried about it, because life gets busy, and we all have other priorities. But I’m glad to be back. A true love of Astronomy and Space will always keep me here, writing about the new and exciting science in a field I have loved my whole life. If you, reading this right now, are the only person who ever reads these words, I hope it adds...
Life in the universe is a fascinating topic. The simplest question: Are we alone? It breeds so many deeper and more profound scientific questions, like “How many habitable planets are there?” “How likely is life to develop on any given planet?” and “How long can a civilization survive?” We can’t answer them definitively, but we can narrow it down. The Drake equation, shown above, was first developed by Frank Drake, the head of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), in 1961. He took the question of are we alone and made it quantifiable, in a probabilistic way. It lets us...
I love false-colour images. They reveal detail that you can’t see in real life, but they also highlight things in an artistic way. For me it’s an excellent marriage of art and science, and as a communicator it helps me get concepts across in an accessible way. So when I saw the APOD image of Saturn from earlier this week, I had to discuss it. Saturn never has looked this way, and it never will. The colours are vivid and unrealistic, but they show the differences in three distinct but close wavelengths of light on the electromagnetic spectrum. All of...
Humans have lived in Space. And so have fruit flies, mice, monkeys, chimpanzees, guinea pigs, rabbits, frogs, reptiles, and a variety of plants. Now we can add a new life form to this list: Flowers. The first ever space flower was revealed recently, and it’s a yellow Zinnia. Scott Kelly has been aboard the International space Station (ISS) for over 300 days. It’s not an easy job, being away from loved ones, nature, and the rest of humanity, locked up with at most five other humans in a tin can that experiences a sunrise every 45 minutes. It messes with...
