Centauri Dreams
Imagining and Planning Interstellar Exploration
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Latest posts
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ED138: What a New Dwarf Planet Portends
An intriguing mission to L1 has caught my eye, one with implications for solar sail development as well as climate issues here on Earth. But the research on that story is taking longer than I anticipated, so for today I want to cut to a brief account of the new dwarf planet…
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Microbes on Enceladus?
Until we get more assets in orbit around Saturn, we’re left to studying Cassini data on the fascinating moon Enceladus, findings that have already revealed much about geyser activity at the moon’s south polar region and its implications. New lab work is now procovative, as Alex…
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Thoughts on Brown Dwarfs, Science Fiction and New Telescopes
Here’s an interesting notion, courtesy of science fiction writer Jack McDevitt. Jack’s story “Lighthouse” (available in Cryptic: The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt (Subterranean Press, 2009) posits an apparently normal brown dwarf that, upon closer study, turns out to be…
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Musings on White Dwarfs and Planetary Survival
A research team at the University of Warwick (UK) has turned up what may be a planet orbiting a white dwarf. That’s an interesting find given the lifetime of white dwarfs after the parent star has lost its outer envelope. Any life on such a world would have several billion years…
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Photosynthesis: A New Angle into Fermi’s Paradox?
One of the things that gives the Fermi paradox its punch is the age of the galaxy. Back in 1950 when Fermi uttered his famous ‘Where is everybody?’ question, ideas about how old the Milky Way was were all over the map. Working with Hubble’s constant as understood at the time,…
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Sakurai’s Object: A Stellar Rebirth
Given how long stars live in comparison to human lifetimes, I always do a double-take at science fiction tales of starships dropping in to study a nova just as it’s about to go off. I suppose we have to assume the starship civilization has found a way to time such matters.…
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Disrupted Systems: Implications for Life
Anthropocentric thinking is a persistent problem when we’re talking about extraterrestrial civilizations. Some of our most cherished notions can be invoked so effortlessly as to defy the imagination. The Copernican idea that life must exist elsewhere because elsewhere is bound…
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Pandora: Tuning Up our Data on Exoplanet Atmospheres
Launching a flagship-class mission like the Roman Space Telescope is always exciting, but with Roman in space, let’s also keep an eye on Pandora, a smaller though fascinating NASA mission (through its Astrophysics Pioneers program) that is now beginning its own work in exoplanet…
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Fermi Explorer: Building the First Mission to Another Star?
The question of when to launch an interstellar mission has occupied us many times in the past. Specifically, how long do we wait so that travel times are reduced to something like the lifetime of a researcher working on the project? But there is another approach to all this.…
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Roman Space Telescope Launches Tomorrow
We’ll have a lot to talk about when observations from the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope start coming in. But first we’ve got to get it out to its halo orbit around the L2 Sun-Earth Lagrange point. With the Sun, Earth and Moon permanently blocked out, the seeing should be…