Monthly Archives: April 2016

One of the greatest difficulties interstellar, or even just interplanetary, travel faces today is the problem of fuel storage. In order to accelerate to fast enough speeds to travel between planets in a reasonable amount of time, as well as to later decelerate, ships would need to hold a tremendous amount of fuel, which would […] Continue reading →

Wow. In these last few months, we have gone over the entire cosmic calendar. The last topic of the class, life elsewhere in the universe, covered stuff that hasn’t even happened on this calendar yet. In this class, I really believe I’ve learned a lot of material, rather than memorizing a lot. Studying for this upcoming… More What’s Next? Continue reading →

The Drake Equation is an equation that was developed to help us determine what life exists in our universe beyond planet Earth. In class, we have been doing much work with the Drake Equation, including filling it out ourselves using our own estimates. But…is the Drake Equation useful or even worth our time? If you are […] Continue reading →

To be, or not to be? Is that really the question? According to the Fermi Paradox, it’s a perfectly valid one. The Fermi Paradox, coined after Enrico Fermi, is a theory that addresses life elsewhere in the universe as a probable reality. The only issue is, however, that no other forms of life (that we […] Continue reading →

To be, or not to be? Is that really the question? According to the Fermi Paradox, it’s a perfectly valid one. The Fermi Paradox, coined after Enrico Fermi, is a theory that addresses life elsewhere in the universe as a probable reality. The only issue is, however, that no other forms of life (that we […] Continue reading →

The use of anti-matter propulsion might be the key to interstellar travel. Anti-matter is basically normal matter that has opposite charges. When matter and anti-matter collide with one another, they annihilate one another and energy is released. Unlike with nuclear fusion, where only 3% of the total mass of the matter is converted into energy, […] Continue reading →

Fermi’s paradox has some unsettling points depending on how you see the glass. Continue reading →

The Chicxulub crater is a crater buried underneath the Yucatan Peninsula which is suspected to be the location of the impact of the meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs. The crater is more than 180km in diameter and 20km in depth. Estimates place the size of the impacting meteor to be at least 10km in […] Continue reading →

We talked much in class about different methods of discovering extrasolar planets, and Dr. G pointed out to us that the only reason people bother looking for extrasolar planets is to try and find life outside of our solar system.  To do this, scientists have to narrow down the list of extrasolar planets into a […] Continue reading →

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is how we have found many exoplanets and have hoped to find more, however, the universe may have other plans… Continue reading →