You've probably seen movies of orbital space habs spinning for artificial gravity. But did you know, that nobody has ever tested this to see how it works out in practise? We know that weightlessnes…

The origin of life remains a great mystery in biology. Billions of years of continental drift erased most of the record, and all that's left of the first half billion years of evolution are some…

Stars like Sol are relatively easy to understand, because they are numerous, and live for billions of years, but high mass stars are rare and live for only a few million years. As a result,…

In 2005,the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa  revealed that the near-Earth asteroid (25143) Itokawa  has a strange peanut shape, leading to questions about why. Now, using ground-based…

Kepler-413b is located 2,300 light-years (about 700 parsecs) away in the constellation Cygnus. It circles a close pair of orange and red dwarf stars every 66 days but what really makes Kepler-413b…

In my article Our Spacecraft Could Look Straight At an Extraterrestrial Microbe - And Not See a Thing! we found out that present day extraterrestrial microbes in our solar system would be sparse and…

The linchpin location of the "Star Wars" franchise was the planet Tatooine, home to both Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It, along with its twin suns, appeared in every movie of the franchise…

As a mathematician I'm used now to the proofs of scientists, which can seem puzzlingly non rigorous at first. But the mathematics of Planetary Protection are particularly eccentric, even bizarre.…

The search for extraterrestrial life goes on, sort of. We do it, as half-heartedly as we do anything in space, because we're more afraid of being alone than finding another civilization. Or vice…

We know now that asteroids are relics that can tell us what the planets in our solar system may have been like before they formed cores and mantles and crusts. But that wasn't always the case. Until…