Science, History, and Fiction in Everyday Life
Everybody familiar with SF knows about the habitable zone, at least the basics. It’s that area around a star where life is possible. A look at any astronomy educational site would provide a more detailed and technical definition: “The Circumstellar…
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Some interesting highlights this week (and NO, I’m NOT going to talk about Falcon Heavy. The rest of the world does it, right?). I have something else. New Horizons (the nice cute probe that recently visited Pluto) just snapped the…
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This year I’ve decided, for once, not to do any New Year Resolutions. After all, I’ve started 2018 in bed with strong flu and the energy level of a (sick) kitten, and it’s not something that puts you in a…
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A few months ago Proxima Centauri b, an exoplanet in the constellation of Centaurus located “only” 4.22 light-years from Earth, got a lot of attention, since it orbits its sun within the habitable zone and will be probably the first in the…
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I have recently seen a lot of articles discussing the so-called ocean worlds – that is, all planets and celestial objects that are not the Earth – and the interest in them is obvious: water is one of the essential…
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An otherwise unremarkable small, cool and rather faint (19 magnitude, less than Pluto, just to be clear) dwarf star located 39.5 light-years from the Sun in the constellation Aquarius, Trappist 1 has become in the last two weeks or so…
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Today is the moment of my periodic summary of space news worth discussing this week (and in the past few, since I haven’t done it in a while). This one features a startling discovery and other interesting topics. As usual,…
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That our Solar System is an original one, we already know it. Surveys about other planetary systems have confirmed what we already suspected about the odd positions of our gas giants and other features (for a good explanation, read this…
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Four days ago, NASA made an amazing announcement – the biggest discovery of exoplanets to date. According to their figures, which added 1,284 planets to the total world count, the confirmed exoplanets are now more than 3,000 (3,264, to be precise)…
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I have already written some time ago about tools for exploring the night sky and find your way around. Today I want to talk about another one I have been recently using, this time for worldbuilding in SF, but that…
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