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Interstellar Travel is a Pain in the Neck

interstellar travel - pixabay

Interstellar space travel. Fantasy of every five-year-old kid within us. Staple of science fiction serials. Boldly going where nobody has gone before in a really fantastic way. As we grow ever more advanced with our rockets and space probes, the question arises: could we ever hope to colonize the stars? Or, barring that far-flung dream, can we at least send space probes to alien planets, letting them tell us what they see? The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible. There’s no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy, and … Read more

SPACE: The Moon is Made of… Jelly?

moon - pixabay

China’s Chang’e-4 lunar rover has discovered an unusually colored, ‘gel-like’ substance during its exploration activities on the far side of the moon. The mission’s rover, Yutu-2, stumbled on that surprise during lunar day 8. The discovery prompted scientists on the mission to postpone other driving plans for the rover, and instead focus its instruments on trying to figure out what the strange material is. Day 8 started on July 25; Yutu-2 began navigating a path through an area littered with various small impact craters, with the help and planning of drivers at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center, according to a … Read more

How Big Is It?

If you’ve ever dreamed of time traveling, just look out at the night sky; the glimmers you see are really snapshots of the distant past. That’s because those stars, planets and galaxies are so far away that the light from even the closest ones can take tens of thousands of years to reach Earth. The universe is undoubtedly a big place. But just how big is it? “That may be something that we actually never know,” Sarah Gallagher, an astrophysicist at Western University in Ontario, Canada, told Live Science. The size of the universe is one of the fundamental questions … Read more

SCIENCE: Building a Planetary “Life Scanner”

Star Trek Beyond

When the crewmembers of the starship Enterprise pull into orbit around a new planet, one of the first things they do is scan for life-forms. Here in the real world, researchers have long been trying to figure out how to unambiguously detect signs of life on distant exoplanets. They are now one step closer to this goal, thanks to a new remote-sensing technique that relies on a quirk of biochemistry causing light to spiral in a particular direction and produce a fairly unmistakable signal. The method, described in a recent paper published in the journal Astrobiology, could be used aboard … Read more

SPACE: Are There Glowing Aliens?

glowing alien - deposit photos

Alien life-forms could glow in spectacular reds, blues and greens to shield themselves from stellar bursts of ultraviolet (UV) radiation. And that glowing light could be how we find them, according to a new study. Most of the potentially habitable exoplanets we know of orbit red dwarfs — the most common type of star in our galaxy and the smallest, coolest stars in the universe. And thus red dwarfs, such as Proxima Centauri or TRAPPIST-1, are at the forefront of the search for life. But if extraterrestrial life does exist on these planets, they have a major problem. Red dwarfs … Read more

FOR WRITERS: What if We Can’t Get There Fast?

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FOR WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer John Bellagio: According to Einstein’s theories, superluminal travel is not possible. Do you agree? What implications would this have for society and our future if there’s no easy “escape valve”? And how would it change our colonization of other stars? Writers: This is a writer chat – you are welcome to share your own book/link, as long as it fits the chat, but please do so as part of a discussion about the topic. Join the chat

SPACE: Build Your Own Wormhole in Three Easy Steps

Wormhole - Pixabay

Everybody wants a wormhole. I mean, who wants to bother traveling the long-and-slow routes throughout the universe, taking tens of thousands of years just to reach yet another boring star? Not when you can pop into the nearest wormhole opening, take a short stroll, and end up in some exotic far-flung corner of the universe. There’s a small technical difficulty, though: Wormholes, which are bends in space-time so extreme that a shortcut tunnel forms, are catastrophically unstable. As in, as soon as you send a single photon down the hole, it collapses faster than the speed of light. But a … Read more

SPACE: Life on Mars

Mars - NASA

Mars may seem barren and inhospitable today, but long ago the Red Planet once looked very different. Once upon a time, Mars was warmer than it is now, and covered in rivers, lakes and seas. There’s no way of saying for sure whether Martians ever existed, experts say. Still, there’s mounting evidence that Mars was not only habitable in theory, but actually home to some kind of extraterrestrial life. It’s even possible that remnants of that life still lurk undiscovered beneath Mars’ surface. Here are six reasons why astrobiologists believe in the possibility of life on Mars.  River Valleys and … Read more

SPACE: Where is Everybody? And What Does That Mean for Us?

stars - pixabay

It is 1950 and a group of scientists are walking to lunch against the majestic backdrop of the Rocky Mountains. They are about to have a conversation that will become scientific legend. The scientists are at the Los Alamos Ranch School, the site for the Manhattan Project, where each of the group has lately played their part in ushering in the atomic age. They are laughing about a recent cartoon in the New Yorker offering an unlikely explanation for a slew of missing public trash cans across New York City. The cartoon had depicted “little green men” (complete with antenna … Read more

SPACE: The Moon is Made of Cheese, and Neutron Stars Are Full of… Soup?

pulsar - pixabay

When your computer glitches, the screen might freeze up for a few seconds before rapidly skipping ahead to correct itself. When a neutron star glitches, much the same thing happens — except, in this case, the screen is a swirling magnetic field 3 trillion times the size of Earth’s. Neutron stars — dense, quick-spinning corpses of once-giant stars that pack about 1.5 times the mass of the sun into a ball with a diameter about as long as Manhattan — are always baffling. But the roughly 5% of neutron stars that are known to “glitch,” or suddenly spin faster for … Read more