Space

The Amazon reviews for David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity don’t alert you to the fact that this is a book on theoretical physics. They sound more like a weepy divorcé’s YouTube comments below a Mark Knopfler guitar solo. ‘I didn’t so much read it,’ says one. ‘It read me.’ ‘I was honestly sad when it was over,’ writes another. ‘This book changed my way of seeing the world, politics, science and, most importantly, of seeing what I will understand as containing some truth.’ When I talk to Deutsch – one of the most sensationally interesting theoretical physicists of our age – on Zoom, I see two beady eyes peering

In July, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System discovered an interstellar object racing through the solar system at a velocity never before seen in a purported comet. Only the third interstellar object ever observed, and now named 3I/ATLAS, it has become the subject of inevitably extravagant internet theories. This possibly ten-billion-year-old visitor has now ‘disappeared’ behind the sun, though not before the European Space Agency photographed it from Mars as it passed by. It looks like a luminous cylinder. Optical illusion, says Nasa. Interstellar objects enter our unconscious just as phases of the moon do. Who knows if they also, like the moon, exert mysterious influences on terrestrial

Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found tentative evidence for a ‘biosignature’ embedded in the light from a distant planet. Scientists and non-scientists around the world tried to interpret the results. Was this it? Was this the moment when humanity could finally claim it had answered that ancient question: are we alone? As an astrophysicist involved in the search for life beyond Earth, I can tell you that the results were not that moment. But that doesn’t make them any less exciting. The simplest cell on Earth puts every other physical system in the universe – including

Elon Musk’s Starship is the biggest rocket ever built. Sending it into space is hard; bringing it back to Earth, in a fit state to be reused, is even harder. The rocket booster, having just carried a craft into space, must not be allowed to crash into the Atlantic and sink to the seabed. Instead, in order for it to be swiftly relaunched, it must fall vertically – back onto a launchpad. But as the rocket approaches touchdown, its engines have to fire towards Earth in order to slow its descent. And the colossal heat and force generated by these engines is enough to cause severe damage to the launchpad

At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio there is, it is rumoured, a secret underground room where a crashed alien spacecraft is kept. It’s warm to the touch, buzzing with a strange energy, an indication of technology light years ahead of ours. Meanwhile, over at Groom Lake Air Force Base in Nevada, otherwise known as Area 51, there are apparently more alien spaceships, some intact, as well as the preserved bodies of alien pilots. Is it true? Well, a recent survey indicated that half of the US population believed their government was covering up evidence of aliens. As someone involved in the scientific search for life in space, however, I

Some time soon we will have to say farewell to our most distant emissary – the Voyager 1 spacecraft. After almost 50 years in space, it’s 15 billion miles away and showing signs of wear and could soon stop transmitting. Late last year, Voyager 1 began to decline, sending back spools of gibberish to its handlers on this planet. A few days ago, Nasa engineers finally traced the problem back to a single chip but it’s clear that Voyager 1 will shortly have to cut contact and make its way out across the universe on its own. It’s strange to think that it will be exploring on out into deep

I’m old enough to have viewed the grainy TV images of the first Moon landings by Apollo 11 in 1969. I can never look at the Moon without recalling Neil Armstrong’s ‘One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind’. It seems even more heroic in retrospect, considering how they depended on primitive computing and untested equipment. 20 July 1969 (NASA/AFP via Getty Images) Once the race to the Moon was won, there was no motivation for continuing with the space race and the gargantuan costs involved. No human since 1972 has travelled more than a few hundred miles from the Earth. Hundreds have ventured into space, but