Paul Gilster

A Saturn mass gas giant may be orbiting Alpha Centauri A, based on solid JWST infrared results and exhaustive simulations of its orbit. It's still a candidate rather than a confirmed world, but follow-up work will tell us soon. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/08/a...

David Kipping's Torqued Accelerator using Radiation from the Sun) concept gets a touch up by Alex Tolley, who asks whether there are ways to extract even more performance from a rotating system capable of exiting the Solar System. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/05/a...

Fresh thinking on the interstellar conundrum. David Kipping's TARS offers fast transit in-system and interstellar options as well. Key benefit is flexibility, capability of swarm missions, and very low cost. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/08/01/a...

SETI at the extremes. I look at science fictional treatments of life in high-energy environments like neutron stars. The SETI community is now beginning to consider possible technosignatures from places we've always ignored. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/07/22/s...

A just released image from Gemini North shows interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, a cometary coma (gas & dust) still fairly compact but sure to grow larger as perihelion approaches in October. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/07/16/a...

Interstellar navigation will need to be autonomous as we go farther & farther from Earth. New Horizons just demonstrated use of parallax by taking images of Proxima Cen & Wolf 359, & determining position from the result. Longest baseline ever used. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/07/15/a...

3I/ATLAS is the third interstellar object we've identified. Almost surely a comet, it's moving toward perihelion in October, and is already active as its surface warms. We'll learn a great deal more about it as this process intensifies. Thoughts on ISO's: www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/07/10/3...

Defining habitability is a must if we are to prioritize targets for next generation telescopes. A quantitative approach appears in a recent paper, though it doesn't necessarily cover all the bases. Alex Tolley takes a look at these ideas in today's post. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/07/07/n...

Using a direct fusion drive as being designed at Princeton for a Sedna orbiter. Interesting conceptual analysis & feasibility study, contrasting this option with a solar sail using desorption, blowing off embedded elements at perihelion. Hint: sail is faster. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/07/01/a...

Looking at a Saturn class world in formation around the star TWA 7. This is a JWST catch & not yet confirmed, but evidence is strongly supportive of a planet here, the smallest yet found via direct imaging. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/06/27/j...

John Coltrane's Sun Ship album inspires musings on interstellar flight as imagined by the ancients and now explored by aerospace engineers. Starflight inspires imaginative leaps even as current missions like the Parker probe push what we can do today. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/06/25/i...

Propulsion via nuclear decay may be workable through new design from Jim Bickford, now entering Phase II at NASA NIAC. Delta-v up to 150 km/sec feasible in these calculations, in a maneuverable & very scalable design. Gravity lens possibilities. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/06/20/t...

Inflatable sails offer steep savings in mass & enable larger payloads. I look today at deep space concepts involving this technology, & new studies on using inflatable structures for exoplanet research via a starshade. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/06/11/i...

You wouldn't expect many gas giant planets around tiny red dwarf stars, & statistics bear this out. But the few that have been discovered are critical for understanding planet formation processes. A look at a new find in context of earlier work. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/06/06/o...

Troubling discrepancy on speed of universe's expansion has pitted cosmic microwave background data against evidence from Type 1a supernovae. New work out of U. of Chicago uses JWST data to close the gap. Problem resolved? Maybe. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/06/03/e...

How many civilizations may have existed in the galaxy millions (or billions) of years before our own? Temporal coincidence may be an issue for detecting megastructures like Dyson swarms. New paper shows how they degrade over time. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/29/m...

Looking for biosignatures is already controversial & will continue to be so. But a null detection can be a useful thing in any case. Alex Tolley examines how we use Bayesian statistics to better understand the probability of life elsewhere. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/23/t...

Unusual optical pulses detected in SETI search explored in new paper. Phenomenon has repeated thrice & baffles researcher Richard Stanton. Hard to explain how these pulses occur but considering them as SETI source is equally unlikely. More on Centauri Dreams: www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/20/u...

Turbulence as a factor in shaping the interstellar medium, now simulated to highest degree ever. Ever changing plasma flows have bearing on star formation and solar wind characteristics, and work on a galactic level. Implications for starflight. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/16/e...

Measuring how a star oscillates depends on precise radial velocity measurements. We're getting really good at this, as new work with implications for both stars & their exoplanets confirms. The orange dwarf HD 219134 is a case in point: www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/13/h...

Communicating w/ alien civilizations poses conundrums Michael Chorost explores in a worldbuilding exercise for a novel about insect-like intelligence. Writing process & perspective-shifting methods offer deep challenges. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/09/w...

Webb Watches Dramatic Weather Changes on a Pair of Nearby Brown Dwarfs When astronomers want to understand brown dwarfs, they often turn to WISE 1049AB. It's a benchmark brown dwarf in astronomy, and the closest and brightest brown dwarf we know of. The binary pair, whic...

Brown dwarfs, which are less massive than stars and more massive than planets, have weather in their atmospheres and it has been measured for a nearby brown dwarf using JWST 🧪🔭
www.universetoday.com/articles/web...

Planet Nine, if it exists, may not be alone in the far outer system. New work trying to observe this world finds a potential hit, but it doesn't square with what appears to be disturbing other outer object orbits. Yet another planet? www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/06/i...

The Voyagers are still hanging on, & New Horizons is quite productive after 19 years. Latest: Mapping of Local Bubble within which Solar System resides (hot plasma left over from supernovae). Bit by bit, we're feeling our way into the dark. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/05/02/n...

A vast molecular cloud turns up much closer to the Sun than the Orion Nebula. Its discovery is a marker for how we're beginning to chart nearby interstellar space, a prerequisite if we are ever to navigate regions of dust and gas at a percentage of lightspeed. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/04/29/c...

Sudden complexity of Earth life in the Cambrian & earlier Ediacaran eras may be explained by collapse of magnetic shield strength. New theory is gaining adherents based on paleomagnetic evidence. Implications for astrobiology. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/04/25/m...

JWST data are shaping our view of 'sub-Neptune' planets. Maybe the ocean world hypothesis needs a second look. This is part 2 of my examination of where the debate now stands. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/04/22/t...

K2-18b just may be a water world under a hydrogen atmosphere, the category dubbed 'hycean' for hydrogen/ocean. Interesting detection of potential biosignatures here, but let's scrutinize carefully. Some thoughts: www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/04/18/a...

Is the famous 'Wow' signal from Ohio State in 1977 result of a natural process? New paper suggests how it might have occurred. Jim Benford discusses this, along with his own thought that Wow might have been evidence of power beaming, accidental catch from ETI. www.centauri-dreams.org/2025/04/15/n...

I'm flattered, but being male, I don't fit the bill in that important aspect!