Space News & Blog Articles

In 1950, during a lunchtime conversation with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, famed physicist Enrico Fermi asked the question that launched a hundred (or more) proposed resolutions. “Where is Everybody?” In short, given the age of the Universe (13.8 billion years), the fact that the Solar System has only existed for the past 4.5 billion years, and the fact that the ingredients for life are everywhere in abundance, why haven’t we found evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence by now? This came to be the basis of Fermi’s Paradox, which remains unresolved to this day.

You know how some constellations take a little bit of imagination to see?  Yes, Leo looks a bit like a lion and Orino a bit like a hunter but then we drift into the realms of powerful levels of imagination to be able to see Pegasus as a flying horse or Telescopium as a telescope! Even squinting or tilting your head really doesn’t make them visible. I found the same problem when looking at images of two stone disks discovered in Italy recently at the entrance to an ancient fort! Teams that have examined the stones have matched the subtle markings on them to positions of 28 bright stars in the sky! I had to really look to see it but I think they might actually be right! 

While many of us were celebrating the end of 2023 and the coming of 2024, the Sun was having its own celebration blasting an X5.0 flare from sunspot region 3536. Records show this to be the most powerful flare seen since 10 September 2017 when an X8.2 flare erupted. The flare is expected to arrive around Jan 2 – EEK that’s today! Get your aurora watching kit out! 

There are many mysteries in the world of astronomy and a fair number relate to the processes during the end of the life of a super massive star. Throw in the complexity of collisions and you have a real head scratching problem on your hands. In 2017 colliding neutron stars were detected and the data has allowed a new simulation to be tested with predictions beautifully matching observation.

Over 6,000 light-years from Earth, an open star cluster and its nebula cover a swathe of sky over 270 light-years across. It’s called the Running Chicken Nebula, and it’s more than just one object. The Running Chicken Nebula, also called IC 2944, also contains IC 2948, the brightest part of the Chicken, as well as several Bok Globules and smaller nebulae. The bright star Lambda Centauri is near the visual center of the Chicken but is actually much closer to Earth.