Why Do We Assume Extraterrestrials Might Want to Visit Us?
It is presumptuous to assume that we are worthy of special attention from advanced species in the Milky Way. We may be a phenomenon as uninteresting to them as…
Category: Air & Space
To us humans, a single Sun feels completely normal, but our Solar System is actually a weird outlier. Most stars in the Milky Way galaxy have at… Read More
On Sunday morning, Virgin Orbit became the third privately funded American rocket company to reach orbit—and the only one to accomplish the feat from mid-air. The company’s liquid-fueled… Read More
Space exploration achieved several notable firsts in 2020 despite the COVID-19 pandemic, including commercial human spaceflight and returning samples of an asteroid to Earth. Read More
Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably killed themselves off already. Read More
Broken Arecibo telescope collapses, ending an era of alien-hunting
A broken cable was the final straw for the already badly damaged Arecibo Observatory’s radio telescope in Puerto Rico. The massive structure’s 900-ton instrument platform collapsed on…
China’s Chang’e 5 mission, tasked with bringing a sample of lunar dirt back to Earth, successfully landed on the Moon on Tuesday, marking the third time that… Read More
As a professor of physics and astronomy, Janna Levin has contributed to our growing understanding of black holes. In her new book, Black Hole Survival Guide, she takes the… Read More
In April, a group of astronomers spotted a short, powerful blast of radio waves coming from outer space and then successfully found where it was coming from:… Read More
TESS, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, was launched in 2018 with the goal of discovering small planets around the Sun’s nearest neighbors, stars bright enough to allow… Read More