Category archives: Astronomy

Pluto: ‘recent’ volcanism raises puzzle – how can such a cold body power eruptions?

Pluto: ‘recent’ volcanism raises puzzle – how can such a cold body power eruptions?

AstronomyGeosciencesPlanetary Science

By Invited Researcher

Pluto, the Solar System’s largest dwarf planet, just became even more interesting with a report that icy lava flows have recently covered substantial tracts of its surface. In this context, “recently” means probably no more than a billion years ago. That’s old, of course – and there is no suggestion that volcanoes are still active […]

Some black holes are anything but black – and we’ve found more than 75,000 of the brightest ones

Some black holes are anything but black – and we’ve found more than 75,000 of the brightest ones

AstronomyAstrophysics

By Invited Researcher

When the most massive stars die, they collapse to form some of the densest objects known in the Universe: black holes. They are the “darkest” objects in the cosmos, as not even light can escape their incredibly strong gravity. Because of this, it’s impossible to directly image black holes, making them mysterious and quite perplexing […]

Seti: how microbes could communicate with alien species

Seti: how microbes could communicate with alien species

AstronomyBiologyMicrobiologyPhysics

By Invited Researcher

Authors: Predrag Slijepcevic, Senior Lecturer in Biology, Brunel University London and Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe, Honorary Professor, University of Buckingham Are we alone in the universe? The famous Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme has been trying to answer this question since 1959. American astronomer Carl Sagan, and many others, believed that other human-like civilisations must […]

To know the dark

To know the dark

Astronomy

By Santiago Pérez-Hoyos

Some weeks ago I came across a little poem via Twitter (ah, the modern world!). It was authored by Wendell Berry, an american writer and farmer very involved in ecologic farming activism. Let’s meet the poem: To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark […]