Review of Robert H. Gray, The Elusive Wow: Searching for Extraterrestrial intelligence (Chicago: Palmer Square Press, 2011). By Amir Alexander The signal from the stars arrived at the Big Ear radio observatory in Ohio at 11:16 p.m. on the night of August 15, 1977. It came in loud and crisp, reaching at least 30 times the volume of the background noise and occupying a single 10 kilohertz-wide band on the observatory’s receiver. Its .... […]

Because I was on the road Wednesday night, I missed the first few hours of reaction to Newt Gingrich’s speech in Florida, when he said he wants to have a permanent station on the Moon "by the end of my second term". It wasn’t until Thursday morning that I opened up my web browser and [...] […]

Sitting in the office at the end of a long week, and looking forward to going to an interesting-sounding concert at St David’s Hall later on. I may get the chance to review it over the weekend, but in the meantime I thought I’d put up this version of one of the pieces I’m going [...] […]

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If you live nearly anywhere on Earth — those of you north of 73° you’re out of luck, but I’m guessing there aren’t many of you! — and look to the southeast shortly after sunset, you’ll see the figure of Orion. Follow the three belt stars to the east, and you’ll see a bright star: [...] […]

If you were wondering where I got yesterday’s piece from, the answer is that I fired up my old laptop and found it among a lot of old papers there. And by “old laptop”, I mean really old laptop: I bought it in 1995! Anyway, since I haven’t got time to write anything today here [...] […]

Confirming Kepler’s planet candidates is a crucial part of the process, because no matter how tantalizing a candidate appears to be, its existence needs to be verified. We have more than 60 confirmed Kepler planets and over 2300 candidates, many of which will eventually get confirmed, but it’s interesting to see that the mission’s latest [...] […]

Yesterday was the weekly live video Space Roundup, run by Fraser Cain from Universe Today. This week we had Pamela Gay, Alan Boyle, Nicole Gugliucci, and Ian O’Neill. We talked about the solar storm, black holes, arsenic life, Newt Gingrich, Phobos-Grunt, and answered some questions from the listeners. Here’s the video: We do these every [...] […]

The IAU greatly regrets to announce the death of Dr. Franco Pacini, on 25 January 2012. He served as President of the International Astronomical Union between 2001 and 2003, and was the inspiration behind the International Year of Astronomy 2009, a huge success for scientific outreach and increasing the awareness ... […]

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