allrite

Imagine that the ice planet Hoth from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back was real. How could life evolve, let alone survive, on a planet entirely covered with snow and ice? Was it always that way, or did some great catastrophe strike the planet and cause it to freeze? I had a lot of fun…

When most people think of radio astronomy, they think of an individual dish antenna, such as the Parkes radio telescope seen in the movie The Dish. However, the radio astronomy world is abuzz with talk of huge projects involving hundreds of individual antennas combined together, with the billion dollar Square Kilometer Array as the ultimate…

The nature of the large high velocity clouds of neutral hydrogen gas observed around our galaxy remains as one of the more enigmatic phenomena in our skies. Some have suggested that these "HVCs" are the building blocks of galaxies, while others believe that they are formed by tidal interactions between the Milky Way and the…

What will the Earth look like in four billion years time? Will life be possible or will the planet be vapourised by an expanding Sun. One thing is certain, the Earth will be a very different planet to the one with live on today. In the attached essay (PDF) I discuss the future for Earth…

We are familiar with the daily weather forecasts on Earth, but rarely do we hear predictions for the Sun’s weather on the nightly news. Yet, without the energy from the Sun there would be no weather on our planet. Giant magnetic storms fling out arches of gas and plasma that are larger than the Earth…