Keith Cooper

Alien life on Mars or Europa could survive off cosmic rays instead of the sun, scientists suggest Mars, Europa and Enceladus are the three most promising locations in the solar system to search for life living off cosmic rays.

My latest article is astrobiology focused, reporting on a new paper that describes how cosmic rays impacting icy moons, planets and rogue worlds in space could provide the energy that microbial life buried underground needs when there's no sunlight available. www.space.com/science/alie...

How science fiction's lost worlds chronicled science's forgotten theories I look back at a forgotten fictional planetary system and the lost scientific ideas that inspired its creation.

My regular Substack post is a little late, so here’s a bonus post that’s something a little bit different – how an obscure science-fiction pamphlet beautifully illustrates the relationship between sf and the scientific theories of its era: storiesfromthecosmicfrontier.substack.com/p/how-scienc...

This is how a supermassive black hole is made All you need is galactic violence, gravity, a lot of gas and a sprinkling of Infinity.

This is how a supermassive black hole is made – my new Substack article focusing on the Infinity Galaxy: a collision between two galaxies that has spawned a new supermassive black hole, potential solving a cosmological mystery in the process storiesfromthecosmicfrontier.substack.com/p/this-is-ho...

Scientists extracted water and oxygen from moon dust using sunlight. Could it work on the lunar surface? "We never fully imagined the 'magic' that the lunar soil possessed."

A recent article of mine looked at new technology that can extract water from the lunar regolith and then use the regolith as a catalyst with CO2 to produce oxygen and methane, for use on a future Moon base. How does this new technique fare with other proposed methods? www.space.com/astronomy/mo...

SETI's search for technosignatures with Rubin The greatest astronomical survey of all time, set to begin chronicling the stars later this year, could also open the door to discovering evidence of technological alien life.

How will SETI's search strategies work with the Rubin Observatory's alert brokers to accelerate the hunt for technosignatures? Find out in my latest article on my Substack: storiesfromthecosmicfrontier.substack.com/p/setis-sear...

Spacecraft can navigate using light from just two stars – Physics World Observations from space and Earth reveal location and heading of New Horizons

Like an ancient seafarer guided by the stars, New Horizons has demonstrated the ability to navigate using the parallax angle of just 2 nearby stars as it heads for interstellar space. Future interstellar flights could one day do the same. My latest for Physics World: physicsworld.com/a/spacecraft...

In search of alien moons The quest for exoplanets has notched up nearly 6,000 discoveries in the past 30 years, but how far behind is the search for exomoons?

New on my Substack: what's the status of our search for exomoons? storiesfromthecosmicfrontier.substack.com/p/coming-soon

An alien comet, newly arrived from interstellar space, is streaking through our Solar System The third interstellar object ever discovered, a comet called 3I/ATLAS, is the centre of astronomers' attention as they race to discover its secrets.

Wanted to get this out sooner, but paid work has to come first! But here it is, new to my substack: the third interstellar object ever discovered, 3I/ATLAS, is the centre of astronomers' attention as they race to discover its secrets. storiesfromthecosmicfrontier.substack.com/p/an-alien-c...

The ocean on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus has the right pH for life — barely "We know that some microbes on Earth can tolerate the range of pH found on Enceladus."

Saturn's moon Enceladus is wondrous, with towering plumes of water vapour spewing into space, fuelled by an ocean deep under the ice. Now evidence is growing that Enceladus' ocean has the geochemistry for life - even if the pH of its water is a little high. Words by me: www.space.com/astronomy/th...

Biting the 'Bullet': Amazing new JWST photo shows titanic collision of galaxy clusters It's another step on the road to one day discovering what dark matter could be.

The James Webb Space Telescope has taken a good look at the Bullet Cluster, precisely locating where the dark matter is hiding based on gravitational lensing – but the cluster collision velocities are still a problem for the standard model. I wrote about it here: www.space.com/astronomy/ja...

The Mystery of the Missing Matter Half of the 'ordinary' matter in the Universe was missing. Astronomers just found it.

Please subscribe to my Substack! The mystery of the missing matter: astronomers have found the Universe's lost ordinary matter in between the galaxies, in a tale that involves galaxy superclusters, FRBs and tensions in Big Bang cosmology! storiesfromthecosmicfrontier.substack.com/p/the-myster...

Cosmic images from the world's largest digital camera are so big they require a 'data butler' The Rubin Observatory's enormous datasets call for cloud computing, seven different "brokers" and, indeed, a butler of sorts.

Rubin Observatory's data handling is seriously impressive, releasing 10 million alerts from 20TB of data each night, then using brokers to which filters can be applied to narrow down all those alerts to the few that are of most interest. My latest for Space.com: www.space.com/technology/c...

Thank you for the great review!

‘Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact’ Review: An Education in Exoplanets Researchers were surprised to find giant gas planets orbiting quite near to their stars. Yet novelists had already imagined worlds like these.

It can be hard to get books reviewed, so I was really pleased that the Wall Street Journal of all places reviewed my book Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact. And they said nice things about it! Plus, the reviewer was spot-on in bringing up Amazing Stories. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Rubin’s astounding first-light images hammer home its promise to transform astronomy The Vera C. Rubin Observatory has released its first breathtaking images of the cosmos.

Subscribe to me on Substack! My latest article on Substack describes the telescope and science objectives behind today's first-light images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory: storiesfromthecosmicfrontier.substack.com/p/rubins-ast...

Cosmic conflict continues: new data fuel the Hubble tension debate – Physics World New measurements of the universe’s expansion using James Webb Space Telescope appear to resolve the Hubble constant conflict – or do they?

My latest for @physicsworld.bsky.social explores the deepening mystery of the Hubble tension, as new results – with one exception – emphasise how local measurements of the Universe's expansion rate differ from the value predicted by the CMB. Is new physics needed? physicsworld.com/a/cosmic-con...

My new book, Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact, is out now from Reaktion Books! It's all about the exoplanets that astronomers are discovering, seen through the lens of science fiction, featuring interviews with astronomers and sf authors reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/amazing...