How difficult is interstellar travel? I’m a huge fan of space travel both real and imagined, and have followed the voyages of the Starship Enterprise since its earliest manifestations. But warp engines aren’t real, and cheating the universe’s speed limit…
When all you have is one example, it’s interesting to speculate but hard to draw conclusions. How Common Are Planets? For most of my lifetime, we only knew of one star hosting a planetary system: ours. Were the conditions that…
nealsumerlin
Posted in Cosmology, Exoplanets, James Webb Space Telescope, Observatory and Telescopes, Stars
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In the post previous to this one, we discussed two of the five operational images released from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on July 12th. Let’s take a look at the remaining three. A QUINTET OF GALAXIES (OR IS…
Where is the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) headed to? News stories describe it in various levels of detail: a million miles beyond the Earth, a halo orbit around the Sun-Earth L2 point. Say what? As long ago as 1736,…
I have been a member of the Planetary Society for years, an organization co-founded by Louis Friedman, Bruce Murray, and Carl Sagan. It is through this organization that I learned I could send my name (on a CD along with…
Sorry, Pluto lovers. A recently published paper by Jean-Luc Margot of UCLA (as a Star Trek Next Generation fan, I had to give the author’s full name) proposes a mathematically rigorous way to define a planet. Pluto, for all its…
Don’t get me wrong. The discovery of Kepler-186f is a big deal: a near Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of its star, neither too close nor too distant from it for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface.…