And where to find my in-depth articles from now on — TL;DR: For those who wish to keep up with my writing and stay informed about space and science, subscribe to me at The Quantum Cat. I should probably have written this a year ago. Five years ago I started writing on Medium. To this day I am not quite sure…

A set of mysterious filaments has astronomers rethinking our galaxy’s black hole — Some ten million stars lie within a parsec of the galactic centre. That’s a fantastic number, especially when you remember that only one star, the Sun, lies within a parsec of Earth. In the midst of those ten million stars, positioned in the very heart of the galaxy, is the…

Recent breakthroughs in astronomy promise to reveal the darkest objects in existence — At the heart of Virgo A, a vast galaxy some fifty million light years from Earth, lies a black hole of awesome power. Like many astronomical objects, its sheer size is hard to grasp. In terms of mass, it weighs over six billion Suns; in terms of radius, it stretches…

Space lasers, satellites and quantum tech add up to a new age of unbreakable security — Long ago, they say, tulips came from the Tian Shen mountains. Over millennia they made their way west; carried first to the gardens of Persia and then onwards, in the hands of princes, to the palaces of the Ottoman sultans and the courts of Europe. Eventually they became precious: so…

Despite more strange behaviour, the demise of Betelgeuse probably isn’t nigh — Of all the stars close to Earth, Betelgeuse is one of the most fascinating. Astronomers have long watched as the star has brightened and dimmed; a cycle of activity so obvious that humans first noted it millennia ago. Betelgeuse does this because it is dying. One day, though probably one…

Upgraded facility poised to unveil insights into black holes and neutron stars — From the beginning Newton had his doubts about gravity. How, he wondered, did the Earth hold the Moon, with no physical contact between them? How did gravity exert its pull, apparently invisibly, across the vast void of space? It was a great absurdity, he wrote, that his law of gravitation…

Six years after we found it, astronomers finally have an idea of what ‘Oumuamua was — At first we thought it was a comet. That made sense: comets usually come from very far away, and this one seemed to have come almost from the stars themselves. Yet the more we looked at it, the stranger things got. This, if it really was a comet, was a…

Rings around Formalhaut tell the story of a new born star system — The star Fomalhaut is one of the brightest in the sky. That’s partly because it is close — lying twenty-five light years from Earth — but also because it is large, roughly twice the size of the Sun. Over the past two decades, observations of Fomalhaut with Hubble and other…

As Voyager fades, NASA redirects New Horizons away from the Kuiper Belt — Forty-six years after departing Earth, Voyager 2 is running low on energy. Its nuclear batteries are fading, slowly depriving the spacecraft of the power needed to run its instruments. In response, operators have been gradually switching off less essential parts of the spacecraft. As the power output continues to fall…