A growing interest in JPL's Solar Gravitational Lens mission here takes Wes Kelly on an odyssey into the past. A long-time Centauri Dreams contributor, Wes looks at the discovery of gravitational lensing, which takes us back not only to Einstein but to a putative...
What do we mean by an 'interstellar mission'? The question came up in relation to Interstellar Probe, that 'Voyager Plus' concept being investigated by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. I do indeed see it as an interstellar mission, as Interstellar Probe...
Jim Benford's study of 'lurkers' -- possibly ancient probes that may have been placed here by extraterrestrial civilizations to monitor our planet's development -- breaks into two parts. The first, published Friday, considered stars passing near our Sun in the...
Jim Benford is continuing his research into the still nascent field known as SETA, the Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts. A plasma physicist and CEO of Microwave Sciences, as well as a frequent Centauri Dreams contributor, Benford became intrigued with recent...
Interesting news out of CNRS (the French National Center for Scientific Research) renews our attention to the mechanisms for supplying the early Earth with water and carbonaceous molecules. We've looked at comets as possible water sources for a world forming well...
What governs the size of a newly forming star as it emerges from the molecular cloud around it? The answer depends upon the ability of gravity to overcome internal pressure within the cloud, and that in turn depends upon exceeding what is known as the Jeans Mass,...
I've used the discovery of 'Oumuamua as a learning opportunity. I knew nothing about the Local Standard of Rest (LSR) when the analysis of the object began, but soon learned that it measured the mean motion of interstellar materials in the Milky Way near the Sun. The...
Héctor Socas-Navarro (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias) is lead author of a paper on technosignatures that commands attention. Drawing on work presented at the TechnoClimes 2020 virtual meeting, under the auspices of NASA at the Blue Marble Space Institute of...
Have a look at what two of our older spacecraft saw on Jupiter's giant moon Ganymede, a world that will snap into much greater focus once the JUICE mission arrives in 2029. The JUpiter ICy moons Explorer is slated for launch in 2022, with the intention of studying...
It doesn’t take much to awaken my internal medievalist. On this score, Andreas Hein’s latest is made to order, looking at European cathedrals, long-term projects and starships. Is there an analogy that impacts long-term thinking here, or is the comparison too strained...