Autumn Among the Galaxy Clusters The idea of moving stars as a way of concentrating mass for use by an…
A Look at Dark Energy & Long-Term Survival If life can organize into sentient beings around stars other than our…
Star Harvest: Civilizations in Search of Energy Living a long time forces decisions that could otherwise be ignored. This is…
Habitability and a Variable Young Sun Given our intense scrutiny of planets around other stars, I find it interesting how…
Vega’s Puzzling Disk Over the weekend I learned about Joseph Haydn’s Symphony No. 47, unusual in that it offers up…
Do You Really Want to Live Forever? Supposing you wanted to live forever and found yourself in 2024, would you…
Streams of Stars and What They Tell Us A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post. The idea of a stream of…
A Gravitational Wave Surprise I think gravitational wave astronomy is one of the most exciting breakthroughs we’re tracking on Centauri…
Planetary Defense: Good News from the Taurids Evidently discovered by French astronomer Pierre Méchain in 1786, Comet Encke was the…
Third Time’s a Charm: A Planet at Barnard’s Star If you follow the fortunes of the stars closest to us,…
Habitability around F-class Stars Some years back I read a science fiction story in which the planet where the action…
Beamed Propulsion and Planetary Security Power beaming to accelerate a ‘lightsail’ has been pondered since the days when Robert Forward…
Green Mars: A Nanotech Beginning I want to return to Mars this morning because an emerging idea on how to…
Pumping Energy into the Solar Wind The solar wind is ever enticing, providing as it does a highly variable stream…
Our Earliest Ancestor Appeared Soon After Earth Formed Until we learn whether or not life exists on other planets, we…
Are Interstellar Quantum Communications Possible? A favorite editor of mine long ago told me never to begin an article with…
The Final Parsec Paradox: When Things Do Not Go Bump in the Night Something interesting is going on in the…
The Search for Things that Matter Overpopulation has spawned so many dystopian futures in science fiction that it would be…
SPECULOOS-3b: A Gem for Atmospheric Investigation “What is this fascination of yours with small red stars?” a friend asked in…
On Astronomical Accidents, and the Proxima Centauri ‘Signal’ that Wasn’t One night a few years back I had a late…
Science Fiction and the Interstellar Imagination “We were dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town; We yearned beyond the sky-line…
Remembering the Y2K ‘Flasher’ Transients have always been intriguing because whether at optical, radio or other wavelengths, they usually flag…
The Beamed Lightsail Emerges If you look at Galaxy’s December, 1962 issue, which I have in front of me from…
Space Exploration and the Transformation of Time Every now and then I run into a paper that opens up an…
The Physics of Starship Catastrophe Now that gravitational wave astronomy is a viable means of investigating the cosmos, we’re capable…
Shutting Down Chandra: Will We Lose Our Best Window into the X-ray Universe? Our recent discussions of X-ray beaming to…
Going Interstellar via Budapest Studying the rich history of interstellar concepts, I realized that I knew almost nothing about a…
And Then There Were Four (or Maybe Not) I’m delighted to see the high level of interest in Dysonian SETI…
New Horizons: Mapping at System’s Edge Dust between the stars usually factors into our discussions on Centauri Dreams when we’re…
Project Hephaistos and the Hunt for Astroengineering For a project looking for the signature of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, the…
Set Your Gyros for Mars: Giving a Second Chance to Conquest of Space Larry Klaes began developing a following for…
ACS3: Refining Sail Deployment Rocket Lab, a launch service provider based in Long Beach CA, launched a rideshare payload on…
Voyager 1: A Splendid Fix Although it’s been quite some time since I’ve written about Voyager, our two interstellar craft…
Medusa: Deep Space via Nuclear Pulse The propulsion technology the human characters conceive in the Netflix version of Liu Cixin’s…
The Interstellar Fusion Runway Evolves Let’s talk about how to get a spacecraft moving without onboard propellant. As noted last…
Deep Space Trajectories: Exiting the Heliosphere Eugene Parker, after whom the Parker Solar Probe was named, seems to have been…
A Week Inside Centauri Dreams No posts this week, as I am wrapping up an overhaul of some of the…
Another Conundrum: How Long Do White Dwarfs Live? Don’t you love the way the cosmos keeps us from getting too…
Inscribing Our Journey to Europa We’re a species that likes to leave evidence of itself in new places. In Greenland,…
New Angles on Planet Formation Planet formation is a fascinating subtopic of the exoplanet hunt, and it may just have…
Close Stellar Encounters and Earth’s Orbit Galaxies look fixed in astronomical photos, but of course they’re dynamic systems ever in…
Solar Gravity Lens Mission: Refinements and Clarifications Having just discussed whether humans – as opposed to their machines – will…
Otto Struve: A Prescient Look at Exoplanet Detection Some things just run in families. If you look into the life…
White Holes: Tunnels in the Sky? It’s good now and then to let the imagination soar. Don Wilkins has been…
Open Cluster SETI Globular clusters, those vast ‘cities of stars’ that orbit our galaxy, get a certain amount of traction…
Alien Life or Chemistry? A New Approach Working in the field has its limitations, as Alex Tolley reminds us in…
Reaching Proxima b: The Beauty of the Swarm NIAC’s award of a Phase I grant to study a ‘swarm’ mission…
Galactic ‘Nature Preserves’ over Deep Time Speculating about the diffusion of intelligent species through the galaxy, as we’ve been doing…
Life Elsewhere? Relaxing the Copernican Principle Most people I know are enthusiastic about the idea that other intelligent races exist…
A Novel Strategy for Catching Up to an Interstellar Object Reaching ‘Oumuamua through some kind of statite technology, an idea…
Forbidden Worlds? Theory Clashes with Observation Back before we knew for sure there were planets around other stars, the universe…
SETI: Musings on the Barrow Scale John Barrow has been on my mind these past few days, for reasons that…
Talking to Starglider When we’ve discussed interstellar ‘interlopers’ like ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, the science fiction-minded among us have now and…
Cometary Impacts: Looking for Life in the Right Places If you had to choose, which planetary system would you gauge…
The Odds on Alpha Centauri How extraordinary that the nearest star to Earth is actually a triple system, the tight…
Eavesdropping on the Neighbors Given that interstellar communications have been on my mind recently, I was delighted to receive this…
Exoplanet Detection: Nudging Into the Rayleigh Limit We’re building some remarkably large telescopes these days. Witness the Giant Magellan Telescope…
The Order of Interstellar Arrival Writers have modeled the arrival of an extraterrestrial probe in our Solar System in a…
To Build an Interstellar Radio Bridge I sometimes imagine Claudio Maccone having a particularly vivid dream, a bright star surrounded…
Galactic Civilizations: Does N=1? I don’t suppose that Frank Drake intended his famous Drake Equation to be anything more than…
The Realities of Interstellar Hibernation Larry Niven played around with an interesting form of suspended animation in his 1966 Ballantine…
Crafting the Interstellar Sail at Delft Breakthrough Starshot’s concept for a flyby of Alpha Centauri would reach its destination in…
Interstellar Sails: A New Analysis of Aerographite A material called aerographite offers options for solar sails that transcend the capabilities…
A Fusion Drive Using Centrifugal Mirror Technologies I want to drop back to fusion propulsion at this point, as it…
Reflections on Breakthrough Starshot If we’re going to get to the stars, the path along the way has to go…
Interstellar Path? Helicity’s Bid for In-Space Fusion Be aware that the Interstellar Research Group has made the videos shot at…
Rethinking Planet 9 Trans-Neptunian Objects, or TNOs, sound simple enough, the term being descriptive of objects moving beyond the orbit…
Tidal Lock or Sporadic Rotation? New Questions re Proxima and TRAPPIST-1 Centauri Dreams regular Dave Moore just passed along a…
The “Habitability” of Worlds (Part II) If we ever thought it would be easy to tell whether a planet was…
Nucleic Acid Stability in the Venusian Clouds How to approach finding life on other worlds will continue to be a…
Administrative Leave “It seems that destiny has taken a hand.” Thus Humphrey Bogart, in a pivotal scene from the iconic…
SETI: New Tools for Screening Out Radio Interference Two new techniques for examining interesting SETI signals come into view this…
The “Habitability” of Worlds (Part I) Dave Moore is a Centauri Dreams regular who has long pursued an interest in…
Reducing the Search Space with the SETI Ellipsoid SETI’s task challenges the imagination in every conceivable way, as Don Wilkins…
On Retrieving Dyson One of the pleasures of writing and editing Centauri Dreams is connecting with people I’ve been writing…
Sunshade: A New Trek through ‘Daedalus Country’ Letting the imagination roam has philosophical as well as practical benefits. From the…
Abundant Phosphorus in Enceladus Ocean Increases Habitability: But is Enceladus Inhabited? Finding the right conditions for life off the Earth…
Building the Gravitational Machine A friend and I were sitting in a diner some time back talking mostly about old…
The Prevalence of ‘Jupiters’ around Larger Stars Work on the Centauri Dreams internals continues, with the unwelcome result that the…
SETI: Asking the Right Questions Did Carl Sagan play a role in the famous Arecibo message transmitted toward the Hercules…
Links for IRG Interstellar Symposium in Montreal The preliminary program for the Interstellar Research Group’s 8th Interstellar Symposium in Montreal…
Assembly theory (AT) – A New Approach to Detecting Extraterrestrial Life Unrecognizable by Present Technologies With landers on places like…
An Ice Giant’s Possible Oceans Further fueling my interest in reaching the ice giants is a study in the Journal…
Voyager as Technosignature Here’s an image that brings out the philosopher in me, or maybe the poet. It’s Voyager 1,…
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Spherical Lens: Reflections on a Gravity Lens Telescope (Part I) A growing interest…
Probing the Shifting Surface of Icy Moons In celebration of the recent JUICE launch, a few thoughts on what we’re…
Go JUICE Take a look at our missions to Jupiter in context. The image below shows the history back to…
Building Smallsat Capabilities for Deep Space ‘LightCraft’ is the term used by Slava Turyshev’s team at JPL and elsewhere to…
The Emerging Sail/Cubesat Paradigm for Deep Space We need to get to the ice giants. We have limited enough experience…
A New Explanation for ‘Oumuamua’s Acceleration Here’s a thought that puts a different spin on exoplanet studies. The speaker is…
