After nine years in deep space, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has run out of fuel. Paul F Cockburn asks what it’s shown us. The American Space Agency NASA’s decision to retire its Kepler Space Telescope, after nine years, may be the end of an era in exoplanet discovery, but no one will likely doubt the […]
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BBC Sky at Night Magazine at the Edinburgh International Science Festival
I am pleased to have been asked, by BBC Sky at Night Magazine, to provide some coverage of the space and astronomy-related events during this year’s 30th Edinburgh International Science Festival. This is in the form of three blog-posts, delivered […]
A Second Chance At First Light: The Isaac Newton Telescope at 50
When The Queen inaugurated the Isaac Newton Telescope on 1 December 1967, its 98-inch mirror made it the fourth-largest reflector telescope in the world. “It is often said that our most brilliant young men are tempted to leave the country and join the brain drain […]
Holidays with the Stars
Astronomy and holiday are two concepts that are increasingly being combined with great results, as Paul F Cockburn discovers. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array is a revolutionary astronomy platform located in the thin, dry air of northern Chile’s Atacama desert that has been providing new insights into star and planet formation since it became operational […]
25 Years of Exoplanets
In January 1992 the first confirmed discovery of an exoplanet was made. Paul F Cockburn looks at how the search for alien worlds has progressed in a quarter of a century. The idea of alien worlds circling distant stars is hardly new; as far back as 1584, Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno suggested space was filled […]
The Search for Vulcan
It’s 50 years since American television viewers first sat down to watch Star Trek, and its popular character Mr Spock, from the distant planet Vulcan. A century earlier, though, many respected astronomers believed that a real planet Vulcan existed within our own solar system – and it took the genius of Albert Einstein to ultimately […]
Two Sides of the Same Coin
When the team at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) announced, in February 2016, that they had detected ripples in the fabric of spacetime – aka gravitational waves – it was final confirmation of a theory which physicists and astronomers had been discussing ever since the publication of Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity back in 1915. […]
