On 14 July 2015 the New Horizons Spacecraft will fly past the dwarf planet Pluto which lies on the edge of our Solar System. This is the culmination of a nine and half year voyage which started when it was launched in back in January 2006. Artist's Impression of New Horizons passing Pluto - Image… Continue reading New Horizons
Tag: longreads
Dark Matter
Revised and re-written 11 December 2025 This post about dark matter and is part of my series on cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the Universe as a whole. As readers of Dark Energy in the Universe will recall, dark matter makes up about 27% per cent of the mass of the Universe. Evidence for… Continue reading Dark Matter
Christmas Day and The Calendar
Merry Christmas to all my readers and followers! Christmas Day, for the majority of people from countries with a Christian tradition is celebrated on December 25. However, followers of the Orthodox church generally celebrate Christmas Day on January 7. The reasons for this difference are interesting and, as I'll discuss further in this post, are more to… Continue reading Christmas Day and The Calendar
The Universe’s History: From Big Bang to Today
Updated 20 November 2025 his post covers a brief history of the Universe from the Big Bang until the the present day. This, as I am sure you'll agree, is a pretty big topic so I'll only give a outline of some of the key events and when we believed they happened. This post is… Continue reading The Universe’s History: From Big Bang to Today
Artefacts From Earth
This is the final post in a series about human efforts to contact extraterrestrials. Today I want to discuss the objects which have already been sent out into interstellar space in the hope that at some point in the distant future an alien civilisation will retrieve and decipher them. The Pioneer Plaque On 3 March 1972 Pioneer… Continue reading Artefacts From Earth
Explaining Science 