Oxygen might be hiding behind grains of cosmic dust
We often think of outer space, the bit between stars, as a complete vacuum. The reality is that, while it is a better vacuum than any we can create on Earth, it is far from empty.
Stories by Kelly Oakes
Look up and see the "stars" tonight...
This post in an updated version of one that appeared last year on the previous incarnation of this blog. Once again, by chance, I'm away from the bright lights of the city during a yearly event that is best witnessed in an area with little light pollution and a clear sky...
On the origin of chemical elements
We take it for granted that there exists a periodic table with numerous elements (at last count, 118) from which we can construct the world around us.
A stellar nursery in Orion
This is a little different to my usual posts. As it is visible on every post on this blog, I wanted to add a little explanation to the picture I chose to use as a banner The image up at the top of the page next to the "Basic Space" was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released in February this year...
Jupiter sneaked up on asteroid belt, then ran away
Mars has always been the toddler of the rocky planet family. With a radius half that of Earth’s and a mass just over one tenth of that of our planet, it is bigger than baby Mercury but not quite as grown up as Earth and Venus...
We're cosmic dust but you're everything to me
On February 23rd 1987, the journey of some light that had been travelling for 168,000 years came to an end. Astronomer Ian Shelton at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile was observing the night sky as usual when he saw something out of the ordinary...
Cassini helps us peek underneath the surface of Enceladus
The Cassini spacecraft is zooming around Saturn as I type, currently in between two flybys of Saturn’s moon Titan – one was in June, the next will be September.
Welcome to Basic Space!
Welcome to Basic Space. For those who read my blog before (all three of you…), this is going to be much the same, only bigger and better.
Habitable and not-so-habitable exoplanets: How the latter can tell us more about our origins than the former
On 29th September this year, astronomers announced the discovery of an exoplanet called Gliese 581 g. This planet, they said, was exactly the right distance from its star for water to exist on its surface, with a good chance that it could hold an atmosphere...
