I was a bit disappointed during the recent Kepler press conference, when they brought in an expert from Industrial Light and Magic who hadn’t prepared any computer graphics to show what life might look like from the surface of Kepler 16b. That’s a shame, since the appeal of fields like astronomy and exobiology for schoolkids is undoubtedly...

Annie Jacobsen’s recent bestseller is a curiously unbalanced book: on one hand it reads as a sober historical account of one of America’s most prevailing twentieth-century mysteries; on the other hand it relishes in the intrigue and mythology surrounding Area 51 to such an extent that one isn’t sure by the end if they are closer or...

NASA has announced today the discovery of Kepler 16b, an exoplanet with some interesting characteristics. The Saturn-sized gas giant orbits around the outside of two stars in a binary system, at a distance closer to the two stars than the Earth to our own sun. Although it is close to its twin suns, the temperature of the exoplanet is estimated to be...

There is something both humbling and inspiring about this photograph, which shows a Perseid meteor falling and burning up in the Earth’s atmosphere, below the camera. The picture was taken from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut Ron Garan on 13 August, 2011. This shot reveals a new perspective on a phenomenon once viewed superstitiously...