HD 219134, an orange K-class star in Cassiopeia, is relatively close to the Sun (21 light years) and already known to have at least five planets, two of them being rocky super-Earths that can be tracked transiting their host. We know how significant ...

Communicating with extraterrestrials isn’t going to be easy, as we’ve learned in science fiction, all the way from John Campbell’s Who Goes There? To Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and the movie Arrival). Indeed, just imagining the kinds of civ...

It was Robert Browning who said “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” A rousing thought, but we don’t always know where we should reach. In terms of space exploration, a distant but feasible target is the solar grav...

Even as I’ve been writing about the need to map out regions just outside the Solar System, I’ve learned of a new study that finds (admittedly scant) evidence for a Planet 9 candidate. I won’t get into that one today but save it for the next post, as ...

We don’t talk about the interstellar medium as much as we ought to. After all, if a central goal of our spacefaring is to probe ever further into the cosmos, we’re going to need to understand a lot more about what we’re flying through. The heliospher...