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Deep Space Implications for CubeSats
The Hera mission has been dwarfed in press coverage by the recent SpaceX Starship booster retrieval and the launch of Europa Clipper, both successful and significant. But let’s not ignore Hera. Its...
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Monkeying Around with Shakespeare
Bear with me today while I explore the pleasures of the Infinite Monkey Theorem. We’re all familiar with it: Set a monkey typing for an infinite amount of time and eventually the works of Shakespeare...
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Vega’s Puzzling Disk
Over the weekend I learned about Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 47, unusual in that it offers up some of its treasures in perfect symmetry. Dubbed ‘The Palindrome,’ the symphony’s third movement,...
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Habitability and a Variable Young Sun
Given our intense scrutiny of planets around other stars, I find it interesting how little we know even now about the history of our own Sun, and its varying effects on habitability. A chapter in an...
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A Millisecond Pulsar Engine for Interstellar Travel
Suppose you want to migrate to another star, taking your entire civilization with you. Not an easy task given our technology today, but let’s remember that in the 13 billion year-plus history of the...
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Clearing the Air
I’ve played around a bit with Bluesky in the past, but have now decided it’s time to make a move. Those of you who have been following the site on X will want to know about the change, as posted in my...
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Star Harvest: Civilizations in Search of Energy
Living a long time forces decisions that could otherwise be ignored. This is true of individuals as well as societies, but let’s think in terms of the individual human being. Getting older creates...
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Close-up of an Extragalactic Star
While working on a piece about interstellar migration as a response to the accelerating expansion of the universe for next week, I want to pause a moment on a just announced observation. I’ve always...
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A Look at Dark Energy & Long-Term Survival
If life can organize into sentient beings around stars other than our own, there are few assumptions we can make about the civilizations that would emerge. We’ve long ago given up on the idea that...
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Autumn Among the Galaxy Clusters
The idea of moving stars as a way of concentrating mass for use by an advanced civilization – the topic of recent posts here – forces the question of whether such an effort wouldn’t be observable even...
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Can Life Emerge around a White Dwarf?
My curiosity about white dwarfs continues to be piqued by the occasional journal article, like a recent study from Caldon Whyte and colleagues reviewing the possibilities for living worlds around such...
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Redefining the Galactic Habitable Zone
To understand the Solar System’s past and to tighten our parameters for SETI searches, we need to consider habitability not only as a planetary and stellar phenomenon but a galactic one as well. The...
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Charting the Diaspora: Human Migration Outward
It’s not often that I highlight the work of anthropologists on Centauri Dreams. But it’s telling that the need to do that is increasing as we continue to populate the Solar System with human...
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An Oddity in the Small Magellanic Cloud
Let’s make a quick return to the Magellanics after our recent look at WOH G64, a dying star imaged in the Large Magellanic Cloud (see Close-up of an Extragalactic Star). These satellite galaxies of...
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Holiday Reprise: Voyager to a Star
As I write, Voyager 1 is almost 166 AU from the Sun, moving at 17 kilometers per second. With its Voyager 2 counterpart, the mission represents the first spacecraft to operate in interstellar space,...
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A Manhole Cover Beyond the Solar System?
Let’s start the year with a look back in time to 1957, a time when nuclear bombs were being tested underground for the first time at the Nevada test site some 105 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas. If...
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Superhabitability around K-class Stars
We think of Earth as our standard for habitability, and thus the goal of finding an ‘Earth 2.0’ is to identify living worlds like ours orbiting similar Sun-like stars. But maybe Earth isn’t the best...
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Planet Population around Orange Dwarfs
Last Friday’s post on K-dwarfs as home to what researchers have taken to calling ‘superhabitable’ worlds has caught the eye of Dave Moore, a long-time Centauri Dreams correspondent and author. Readers...
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Recalibrating ‘Hot Jupiter’ Migration
What catches your eye in this description of an exoplanetary system? Start with a ‘hot Jupiter,’ with a radius 0.87 times that of our Jupiter and an orbit of 7.1 days. This is WASP-132b, confirmed in...
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A Necessary Break
It’s time to write a post I’ve been dreading to write for several years now. Some of my readers already know that my wife has been ill with Alzheimer’s for eleven years, and I’ve kept her at home and...
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