Sometimes all it takes to spawn a new idea is a tiny smudge in a telescopic image. What counts, of course, is just what that smudge implies. In the case of the object called ‘Oumuamua, the implication was interstellar, for whatever it was, this smudg...

One idea for deep space probes that resurfaces every few years is the inflatable sail. We’ve seen keen interest especially since Breakthrough Starshot’s emergence in 2016 in meter-class sails, perhaps as small as four meters to the side. But if we ch...

The assumption that gas giant planets are unlikely around red dwarf stars is reasonable enough. A star perhaps 20 percent the mass of the Sun should have a smaller protoplanetary disk, meaning sufficient gas and dust to build a Jupiter-class world ar...

When one set of data fails to agree with another over the same phenomenon, things can get interesting. It’s in such inconsistencies that interesting new discoveries are sometimes made, and when the inconsistency involves the expansion of the universe...

Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time…

—Tennyson

Temporal coincidence plays havoc with our ideas about other civilizations in the cosmo...