astronomy
We should be excited about signs of alien life
Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found…
Versailles’s role as a palace of science
The vast seat of Bourbon power also doubled as a laboratory for experiments in astronomy, hydraulics, engineering, ballooning, medicine, mathematics and cartography
How French absolutism powered a techno-progressive revolution
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over…
Under pressure: what might life look like on another planet?
Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting Sun-like stars throughout the universe. This discovery ended 2,500 years…
Those magnificent men and their stargazing machines
Violet Moller focuses on three 16th-century‘heroes of science’, John Dee, Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and their great libraries and observatories
A surprising number of scientists believe in little green men
Eminent astronomers have explained cosmic anomalies as alien megastructures and spaceships, while the source of the celebrated Wow! signal remains anyone’s guess
Now imagine a white hole – a black hole’s time-reversed twin…
Just as you can enter a black hole without leaving it, you can exit a white hole without entering it – but first you must understand what black holes really are
Circular arguments
Aristotle had long proved that the Earth was spherical, and even the illiterate masses of early medieval Europe were aware of the fact, says James Hannam
We are all stardust
It seems something of a disservice to a work of this seriousness to say how beautiful it is, but that…
An orange or an egg?
Simon Winchester follows the volatile French mission to Ecuador in 1735 to determine the shape of the Earth
A Titan of science
This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself ‘in ink and paint’, is enchanting to the point of escapism. The…
Science and religion intertwine
We can probably blame George and Ira Gershwin. It was that brilliant duo who, in 1937, penned the memorable lyric…
Believing in big data is equivalent to believing in the stars
Look up at the sky on a clear night. This is not an astrological game. (Indeed, the experiment’s more impressive…
Earth dying in five billion years I can deal with, but not a world-weary Brian Cox
When you see the opening caption ‘4.6 billion years ago’, it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re watching a programme…
The only thing that baffled Einstein was his own popularity
On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society, held at London’s…
Universal appeal
Yet another sign that we are living in very strange times: a pair of celebrities, their names made by TV,…
Worshipping the sun
The Sun is a star that many astronomers assume is only worth studying because of its averageness; it’s middle-aged and…
Space case
The idea that Radio 2 should be sold off by the BBC to a commercial rival is as nonsensical as…
Charon
‘What about the moon Tracey?’ asked my husband facetiously when an astronomer on the wireless, talking of Pluto’s moon Charon,…
The strangest objects we know of
The idea of black holes sounds so quintessentially modern and 20th-century that it may come as a surprise to learn…
Some watcher of the skies
We live in an age of astronomical marvels. Last year Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft made a daring rendezvous with the comet…
