RSS Parrot

Inflatable Technologies for Deep Space

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Published: June 11, 2025 09:04

One idea for deep space probes that resurfaces every few years is the inflatable sail. We’ve seen keen interest especially since Breakthrough Starshot’s emergence in 2016 in meter-class sails, perhaps as small as four meters to the side. But if we choose…

Odd Couple: Gas Giants and Red Dwarfs

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Published: June 6, 2025 12:15

The assumption that gas giant planets are unlikely around red dwarf stars is reasonable enough. A star perhaps 20 percent the mass of the Sun should have a smaller protoplanetary disk, meaning sufficient gas and dust to build a Jupiter-class world are…

Expansion of the Universe: An End to the ‘Hubble Tension’?

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Published: June 3, 2025 14:10

When one set of data fails to agree with another over the same phenomenon, things can get interesting. It’s in such inconsistencies that interesting new discoveries are sometimes made, and when the inconsistency involves the expansion of the universe,…

Megastructures: Adrift in the Temporal Sea

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Published: May 29, 2025 09:09

Here about the beach I wander’d, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time… —Tennyson Temporal coincidence plays havoc with our ideas about other civilizations in the cosmos. If we want to detect them, their…

The Statistically Quantitative Information from Null Detections of Living Worlds: Lack of positive detections is not a fruitless search

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Published: May 23, 2025 12:04

It’s no surprise, human nature being what it is, that our early detections of possible life on other worlds through ‘biosignatures’ are immediately controversial. We have to separate signs of biology from processes that may operate completely outside of…

Unusual Skies: Optical Pulses & Celestial Bubbles

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Published: May 20, 2025 13:31

Finding unusual things in the sky should no longer astound us. It’s pretty much par for the course these days in astronomy, what with new instrumentation like JWST and the soon to be arriving Extremely Large Telescope family coming online. Recently we’ve…

Eddies, Flows and van Gogh: Probing the Interstellar Medium

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Published: May 16, 2025 13:05

Science fiction collectors may well look a the two images below and think they’re both Richard Powers’ artwork, so prominent on the covers of science fiction titles in the mid-20th Century. Powers worked often for Ballantine in the 1950s and later, always…

HD 219134: Fine-Tuning Stellar Music

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Published: May 13, 2025 14:19

HD 219134, an orange K-class star in Cassiopeia, is relatively close to the Sun (21 light years) and already known to have at least five planets, two of them being rocky super-Earths that can be tracked transiting their host. We know how significant the…

Writing a Social Insect Civilization

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Published: May 9, 2025 17:04

Communicating with extraterrestrials isn’t going to be easy, as we’ve learned in science fiction, all the way from John Campbell’s Who Goes There? To Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and the movie Arrival). Indeed, just imagining the kinds of civilizations…