Space

Untitled Document So Elon Musk's Tesla roadster is now in an orbit that takes it right out to the asteroid belt not far from Ceres. And what a thrilling launch it was with the two boosters landing so perfectly choreographed. It was nearly flawless. Only one minor hiccup, that the core booster missed the barge and crashed into the water, probably at around 300 mph, scattering the barge with shrapnel. They will surely fix that too with future launches. If any of you haven't seen it yet, here is the launch video archived by SpaceX. And here is Elon Musk talking about it in a press conference…

I’m continuing to get scared PM's and posts to our Doomsday Debunked Facebook group about the lunar eclipse on 31st January. There is nothing at all to worry about. You’ve had lunar eclipses like this many times in your life and never noticed. Now it appears in Facebook Trending with comments - and many people, children and adults, get scared of it, with panic attacks. Some of the PM's and comments I get are verging on suicide about this. For a shorter version of this, see my Short summary - why the super blue blood moon on Jan 31 can’t harm us Their fears are based on comments (first…

I am currently spending the week in Leiden (Netherlands), attending to a very interesting workshop that brought together computer scientists, astronomers, astrophysicists, and particle physicists to discuss how to apply the most cutting-edge tools in machine learning to improve our chances of discovering dark matter, the unknown non-luminous substance that vastly overweights luminous matter in the Universe.The venue is the Lorentz center of Leiden University, a wonderful place for workshops, where you are pampered in many ways, from having your private office, with digital key and all, to…

In the United States, we just had another Supermoon, and at the end of this month we will have a Blue Moon (the second full moon in a month) with a lunar eclipse, which is pretty special. Though doomsday prophets like to make a lot out of those natural phenomena, the rest of us want to plan our vacations around them - the solar eclipse in the summer of 2017 caused the largest mass migration in America's history because everyone wanted the best view. We were in awe the way our ancestors were. As outlined in USA Today, Christopher Columbus knew one was coming and used it to impress natives, in…

I have had lots of questions about this today because of a poorly researched Daily Star sensationalist article based on a many years out of date NASA press release. As usual with Google News this nonsense has gone right to the top of its search results. They really do need to fix this!  Anyway I am writing this in the hope that it gets into Google News and helps some of the people getting scared by this story. So far I can't see any debunking articles there and the Science 2.0 articles do often get placed high in Google News. Phil Plait of "Bad Astronomer" fame has a few choice…

Stephen Hawking tends to exaggerate, using hyperbole - exaggerations for emotional effect. In this talk he takes our exponential population growth and extrapolates it forwards to 2600 and predicts that human beings will cover the globe shoulder to shoulder and that our electricity consumption will turn the surface of Earth red hot through the waste heat. Stephen Hawking hasn't taken account of the fact that our exponential growth has stopped. The same number of children were born in 2005 as in 2017 and our population is currently growing due to increasing lifespans, not through exponential…

When we search the cosmos for evidence we are not the first advanced life form, we look for things that we could share in common. This anthropomorphism is common in culture, in everything from science studies to science-fiction. And it may not be wrong. Assuming we have any extra-terrestrial neighbors, far less popular is the idea that we will be the advanced civilization new ones are terrified about being invaded by, they will likely have undergone natural selection just like we did. In the video game Spore, almost everyone evolved creatures that were purple and had huge eyes, despite trying…

It may not seem to make sense but most of the universe - mass - can really only account for about 6 percent of what is going on. The rest of it can be under just about any umbrella at this point. Some call it the God of the Gaps, scientists call the unknown mass Dark Matter. What is it? No one knows, when it comes to the very large and the very small, physics does not have all the answers, but something has made the universe at least 100 billion light years in size even though it's only 13 billion years old. As you know, a light year is the distance light will travel in that time. Since…

The 24.2-day semi-periodicity of KIC 8462852 was first noted in Boyajian et al. (2015) and subsequently generated some interest. ETI enthusiasts apparently interpret it as evidence of artificial planning (e.g. intervals between megastructures that follow a clearance guideline in a shared orbit.) The more skeptical observers seem to either dismiss it as a meaningless chance finding (a view that was justifiable not long ago) or as something that would have to be produced by intrinsic variability. My view, which I've already outlined, is that the 24.2-day semi-periodicity is much more than a…

Elon Musk is talking about his plans for Mars again, which is no surprise because he set up SpaceX to send humans to Mars. Lockheed Martin also unveiled their design for a rocket to land vertically on Mars much like SpaceX. But is it a good idea to send humans there anyway? In the news stories about these rockets, nobody even questions this. But what if our microbes trash the planet for the search for life. This is an artist's impression which gives an idea of what the Lockheed Martin spaceship would look like after landing on Mars.  Yes it would be an exciting day when the first human…