These are some of my cosmology posts
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Spaceport UK?
I was very pleased to hear a couple of weeks ago that the UK government plans to introduce a piece of legislation called the Modern Transport Bill. This may not sound very exciting, but behind the uninspiring name is the intention to ultimately establish the UK’s first commercial spaceports, from which space tourists as well as scientists…
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Giving Venus an artificial magnetic field
As discussed in a previous post, in the far future humanity may decide to terraform Venus so that the planet has a similar temperature and atmosphere to that which currently exists on the Earth. However, the lack of a global magnetic field would cause significant obstacles to humans settling on Venus. Without this protective shield inhabitants would be exposed to the…
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The Earth’s magnetic field
Revised and Updated 1 February 2026 The Earth is unique among the inner planets in our Solar System (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) in that it has a strong magnetic field. It is this invisible field which causes the needle of a compass to point North that has been used by navigators for centuries and is used…
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ExoMars TGO: Tracking Methane in the Martian Atmosphere
The ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, launched in 2016, aimed to study methane on Mars, a gas that might indicate geological or biological activity. Initially suspected to exist in trace amounts, recent findings revealed no detectable methane, leading to questions about previous measurements and highlighting mysteries around Mars’ atmospheric composition.… Continue reading ExoMars TGO: Tracking Methane…
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Breaking news!
News is just reaching us of the most amazing astronomical discovery which I am ever likely to experience in my lifetime, one which I never thought I would see. As regular followers of this blog will know, the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute has been searching for evidence of life in the universe by looking for some…
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Easter – 27 March 2016
This year, for the majority of Christians, 27 March will be Easter Sunday, one of the most of the most important dates in the Christian calendar. Although Easter is a is a festival celebrating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, it is also widely marked by non-Christians in the UK, particularly as there are two very welcome public…
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The first day of spring
Now that we are in the month of March, for most of us in the northern hemisphere the worst of the winter is over, and it is only a couple of weeks until 21 March, the first day of spring. 21 March is an important date for other reasons, too. For one thing, it is used as the basis for the…
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The Discovery of Gravitational waves
Originally posted 2016. Revised March 2026. Gravitational waves were predicted by Albert Einstein back in 1916, and were finally detected one hundred years later in Febuary 2016 after decades of unsuccessful searching. In an announcement on 11 February at a Washington DC press conference David Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, said:[1] “Ladies and gentlemen,…
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Terraforming Venus
Updated December 2025 In a previous post I have discussed living on Venus in floating colonies. I’ll now discuss terraforming. This the process of changing the global environment of a planet in such a way as to make it suitable for human habitation. Because it is so far beyond our current technological capabilities, most articles about…
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Living on Venus
In this post I’ll look into the distant future and talk about humans living and building settlements on the planet Venus. Because it is well beyond what we can achieve with our current technology, it is a topic that been more in the realm of science fiction rather than factual scientific writing. However, even though there are many difficult obstacles in…
Explaining Science 