On December 17th 2012 two small spacecraft called Ebb and Flow punched into the lunar surface at over 3,700 miles an hour. This ended the year long mission of NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL). The twin spacecraft spent most of this time orbiting the Moon’s surface at a scarily low altitude of about [...]

It’s been an exciting few days for exoplanetary science. A slew of refined statistical measurements of the abundance of other worlds have made it clearer than ever that our galaxy is crammed with planets. One in six stars should host at least one Earth-sized object in an orbit smaller than that of Mercury, implying that [...]

About three years ago I had an epiphany, or maybe it was a small bout of lunacy. I realized that I wanted to try to write a real book – something that wasn’t just another peer-reviewed journal article reporting the minutiae of a piece of research that precisely ten other people on the planet were [...]

This year has been a spectacular one for exoplanets. New discoveries and new insights have truly pushed the gateway to other worlds even further open.     In the past 12 months we’ve gained increasingly good statistics on the incredible abundance of planets around other stars and their multiplicity. We also finally seem to have [...]

Cover your mouth when you cough! We’ve all learned the hard way that microbial organisms, from bacteria to viruses, can be transported by air. But the extent to which organisms exist in the Earth’s atmosphere is only now becoming clear. There is good evidence that bacteria (or bacterial spores) can help nucleate water condensation, seeding [...]

It’s been a busy season for research that comes in under the astrobiology umbrella, here’s a smattering of some of the more interesting recent discoveries and studies.       The youngest solar system….so far. Locating and studying the birth of stars and planets is an enormous challenge, but a vital component in learning about [...]

This post is something a little different from the usual. I just spent an enjoyable few days filming for a BBC Horizon documentary on the modern story of black holes, and their role in galactic astrophysics (a tale told in part in my book Gravity’s Engines). I also learned that the director, Dan Clifton, had [...]

This is simply too good to pass up, although it’s been doing the rounds online. As the seasons change on Saturn the north polar region is now getting its share of faint solar illumination. Cassini recently (very recently, as in Nov 27th) took this amazing image of the swirling atmospheric circulation at the northern pole [...]

What would the landscapes of Mars look like under a different light? Getting an accurate visual sense of the rocks and minerals on the martian surface is important for a number of reasons. For science it’s critical that objects are correctly seen, especially in terms of colors. Spectral features help give compounds their optical fingerprints [...]

They really are. The universe is apparently well past its prime in terms of making stars, and what new ones are being made now across the cosmos will never amount to more than a few percent on top of the numbers already come and gone. This is the rather disquieting conclusion of a new and [...]