Tag Archives: Astronomy

What Cost The Night Sky? How Three Unrelated News Stories Ruined My Sleep

Posted on by
Reply

There’s a particular kind of headache that comes from reading three unrelated news stories in the same week and realising they’re not unrelated at all, and this has been one of those weeks. In truth, this article exists because I couldn’t quite let those stories go, and I’ve broken my own rule of not writing at the weekend because of it. The articles had been rattling around in my head for while, keeping me awake last night, and before I realised what I was doing, this morning, I was deep into research papers, budget tables, news archives and LinkedIn posts, trying to work out whether the numbers being quoted actually added up. The deeper I dug, the stranger the picture became. What follows is the result of several hours of increasingly obsessive fact-checking, prompted in equal measure by frustration at the money governments somehow always find for wars and by the determination of certain tech billionaires to spend vast fortunes attempting to turn themselves into the first Bond villain.

Let’s start with the sky itself, because that’s where this began, with 1.7 million satellites versus the whole of astronomy. The European Southern Observatory has just done something nobody had bothered to do properly before: modelled what happens to astronomy if everything currently proposed for orbit actually gets launched.

The number ESO astronomer Olivier Hainaut arrived at for “acceptable” damage, the point at which satellite interference stays roughly comparable to routine equipment failures is 100,000 faint, naked-eye-invisible satellites.

The number currently on the table, across every proposed constellation from every operator, is over 1.7 million.

That’s not a rounding error. That’s a different universe of consequence, and the specifics are grim: ESO’s Very Large Telescope could lose up to 28% of its field of view to Starlink alone. The Vera Rubin Observatory, arguably the most ambitious survey telescope ever built, stands to lose hours of observing time every single night. And then there’s Reflect Orbital, a company literally planning to put mirrors in orbit to beam sunlight onto Earth after dark, with up to 50,000 of them proposed by 2035. Hainaut’s modelling suggests they could make the night sky itself four times brighter, even from a light-polluted city like Munich.

We are, with a straight face, discussing whether to switch the night sky off. Not metaphorically, actually switch it off!

Here’s where it stops being an abstract problem for astronomers in Chile and starts being a very local one. Meanwhile at home, the same week this ESO analysis landed, the Royal Astronomical Society reported that the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council is withdrawing all funding for e-MERLIN, the network of radio telescopes that includes the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank. Jodrell Bank. The place that tracked Sputnik. The place that’s been quietly doing world-class radio astronomy since before most of us were born. It’s now at genuine risk of closure.

That’s not the whole of it, either. The RAS reported the UK is withdrawing from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope entirely, cutting 20% from the Square Kilometre Array Regional Centre, cutting 20% from the UK’s own contribution to Vera Rubin, yes, the same observatory the satellites threaten to steal hours from, and cutting 40% from the BISON solar monitoring network.

So: the instrument is being switched off from above, and the people who’d use it are being defunded from within, in the same month. If you set out deliberately to sabotage a field of science, it’s hard to imagine a more efficient one-two.

Now for the number that actually made me sit down and do the maths, and look at what we are proposing to spend it on instead, because I’d heard a vague comparison somewhere and wanted to check whether it held up. It doesn’t hold up quite the way I’d remembered. It’s a lot more startling than that.

The US-Israel war on Iran that began in February 2026, Operation Epic Fury, to give it its official name, has, according to the Pentagon’s own figures given to the Senate on 21 July 2026, cost $37.5 billion so far. That’s up from $29 billion in May and $25 billion in April; the number has been climbing by roughly a billion dollars a week. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth is now asking Congress for up to $70 billion more in emergency funding, as part of an $87.6 billion supplemental request. If Congress approves that request, the total cost attributable to the conflict could exceed $100 billion.

Here’s the part that stopped me. NASA doesn’t actually cost all that much by federal-government standards. Its annual budget has been remarkably steady at around $24-25 billion a year. The $37.5bn already spent on the Iran war is therefore equivalent to roughly eighteen months of NASA: every mission, every telescope, every ongoing operation, every payroll. Already spent, already gone, no projections involved.

Add the funding now being requested and the comparison grows to roughly four years and four months of the entire US civilian space programme. Say it slowly: four-and-a-bit years of the entire United States space programme, potentially gone in five months of a war that hasn’t produced an observatory, a scientific instrument, or a single piece of usable knowledge about the universe we live in. But hey, that’s OK, it has put the cost of living through the roof.

The arithmetic is straightforward. Add together 2026 and roughly half of 2025 and you reach the equivalent of the $37.5bn already spent on the war. Continue through 2024, 2023 and part of 2022 and the total reaches roughly $107.5bn. Same source data, same calculation, just expressed in time rather than dollars.

I’m not usually one to get on my soapbox, and I do try not to be the “billionaires bad guy,” mostly because it’s boring and it’s usually not that specific a complaint. But specificity is exactly what we have here. We’re not talking about an abstract injustice, we’re talking about a precise, sourced, comparable set of numbers. A dark sky and a functioning radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, for the price of what a war spends in a matter of weeks. Actual, unglamorous, patient scientific research, the kind that doesn’t make anyone rich, doesn’t come with a rocket launch livestream, and doesn’t get you invited on a podcast, going begging for a fraction of a fraction of what gets found overnight for other purposes.

If there’s a genuine, defensible case for where the enormous fortunes of the “let’s conquer space” tech-billionaire set should go, it’s here: into keeping Jodrell Bank’s lights on, not into another few hundred thousand satellites and orbital mirrors marketed as innovation. And if there’s a case for where a nation’s money should go, the maths above makes it for me. NASA gave us the Moon landings, Hubble, and forty years of thinking a bit harder about our place in the universe, and it did all of that on this budget. The full Iran war bill, once the current request lands, could run past four years and four months of that budget. But you don’t even need the bigger number to make the point, eighteen months of NASA, gone in five months of a war that won’t produce a single new fact about a single distant galaxy.

We can afford to look at the stars. We just keep choosing not to.



A quick note on the sources: The comparisons made in this article are drawn from publicly available sources, including ESO’s satellite-impact study, the Royal Astronomical Society’s reporting on UK astronomy funding, Pentagon cost figures reported by Reuters, the BBC and The Guardian, and NASA budget data. The references are included so readers can verify the numbers for themselves and see exactly how the conclusions in this article were reached. Regular readers will know I don’t usually include a source list like this, but because this article grew out of several hours of fact-checking and number-crunching, I thought it was only fair to show my working.

Sources:
ESO, “Beyond the limit”: one million satellites and mirrors in space pose grave threat to the night sky — the original ESO/Olivier Hainaut study
New Atlas, “1.7 million planned satellites to have ‘devastating’ impact on astronomy” — corroborates the 28% VLT field-of-view figure
Royal Astronomical Society, “Mass cuts and potential Jodrell Bank closure ‘devastating’ for astronomy”
Reuters, “War in Iran has cost the US $37.5 billion so far, Pentagon says” (21 July 2026)
Reuters, “US war in Iran has cost $29 billion so far, Pentagon says” (12 May 2026)
The Guardian, “Hegseth tells Senate war on Iran has so far cost $37.5bn” (21 July 2026)
BBC, “Iran war has cost US $37.5bn so far, Hegseth says” (21 July 2026)
Wikipedia, “Budget of NASA” (figures sourced to The Planetary Society’s historical NASA budget dataset)

Five Things That Sound Completely Made Up (But Are Annoyingly Real)

Posted on by
Reply

Following on from last Friday’s article, one of the side effects of learning about Hawking radiation is discovering that modern physics is less a collection of facts and more a collection of increasingly unsettling revelations. Every time you think you’ve found the weirdest thing in the universe, physics quietly says, “Hold my equations.”

Here are five examples.

1. Right now, you are hotter than a black hole.

Let’s begin with an insult to black holes. And that is that right now you are hotter than most, if not maybe all, the black holes in the universe

Despite their reputation as the ultimate cosmic monsters, most black holes are astonishingly cold. Hawking showed us that black holes possess a temperature, and the larger the black hole, the colder it becomes. Therefore, a black hole with roughly the mass of our Sun would have a Hawking temperature of only a tiny fraction of a degree above absolute zero.

Meanwhile, you are sitting there at around 310 Kelvin (37°C), radiating infrared energy into your surroundings like a particularly self-satisfied space heater. So, thermally speaking, you’re absolutely thrashing a stellar-mass black hole. That is the same object capable of swallowing stars is, from a temperature perspective, a pathetic overachiever. The universe’s most feared gravitational predator is colder than deep space and vastly colder than the cup of tea that is slowly cooling beside me.

Hawking radiation revealed that black holes aren’t just gravitational objects. They’re thermodynamic objects. And thermodynamics has a wonderful habit of humiliating our intuitions.

2. Space ain’t empty.

The phrase “empty space” is one of the most misleading expressions in science. You got it, empty space is most definitely not empty.

What looks like nothing is actually a restless sea of quantum fields. According to quantum field theory, even a perfect vacuum contains fluctuations, tiny disturbances that constantly appear and disappear throughout space. This isn’t a rare occurrence, it’s happening everywhere, right now, around you, and, amazingly, it’s happening inside you! Between every atom in your body! Creepy and weird or what!!

In fact, Hawking radiation exists because black holes interact with these quantum fluctuations near their event horizons, and without the vacuum’s constant activity, Hawking’s discovery wouldn’t work. Which brings us back to that unsettling conclusion that nature doesn’t seem particularly fond of “nothing.”

Give the universe an empty stage, it’s competing with the best improv stand-up comedians. It immediately starts improvising itself!

3. Black holes ain’t that heavy.

If black holes are gravity taken to the extreme, neutron stars are gravity’s terrifying warm-up act. A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh around a billion tonnes

Now then. A neutron star forms when a massive star dies and its core collapses so completely that atoms themselves are crushed. Electrons and protons merge into neutrons and produce an object roughly the size of a city but containing more mass than our Sun.

The result of this is density on a scale that defies common sense. A single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh roughly a billion tonnes. That’s not a billion kilograms. That’s a billion tonnes. The sort of weight that makes the phrase “pick it up carefully” somewhat academic.

If you somehow brought that teaspoon to Earth, it wouldn’t politely sit on a kitchen counter and reality would very quickly become an SEP (you know what that is, you’ve read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, it’s when Ford and Arthur arrive at lords on a battered sofa at the beginning of Life, the Universe, and Everything, Ford, clocking Slartibartfast’s ship out of the corner of his eye has to explain to Arthur there’s an SEP over there, try and catch it unawares by glimpsing it from the corner of your eye). Somebody else’s problem.

And at this point, every Futurama fan is now thinking exactly the same thing. “Wait… isn’t this basically Nibbler?” To which science’s answer is both inconvenient and hilarious, and the answer is, “yeah, sort of.”

Nibbler’s species, the Nibblonians, are famously absurdly dense. In one episode, Nibbler casually produces poo that weighs thousands of pounds, despite  Nibbler himself being roughly the size of an enthusiastic housecat. For once, science fiction wasn’t completely making things up. A neutron star packs so much mass into such a tiny volume that a teaspoonful would weigh about a billion tonnes. Compared to that, Nibbler is practically watching his figure.

Somewhere in the universe, one suspects Nibbler is looking at a neutron star, nodding approvingly, and muttering, “Hmm… at last… a sensible-sized snack.”

Physics occasionally likes to remind us that density can be every bit as terrifying as size. And occasionally, it reminds us that Futurama was alarmingly well-informed.

4. Whatever is out there in the blackness, we can’t see it.

If Hawking radiation teaches humility, dark matter delivers the knockout punch. And that is most of the universe appears to be made up of something we can’t actually see.

For centuries we assumed that stars, planets, gas clouds and galaxies were the universe. Then astronomers started measuring how galaxies rotate, and the numbers didn’t add up.

Galaxies should have flown apart. But, instead, something invisible appeared to be providing extra gravity and holding everything together. Astronomers now call this missing ingredient dark matter.

And here’s one of those questions, you, my lovely readers, like to ask. What is dark matter?

The awkward answer is we still have absolutely no idea what it is. What we can infer is its existence from its gravitational effects. That is, we see the way it influences galaxies and bends light, but direct detection remains elusive. The evidence, however, says something is there. We just don’t know what.

Imagine discovering that most of your house consists of invisible rooms nobody can enter. That’s roughly where modern cosmology currently stands with dark matter.

5. What the hell is light doing?

And finally, quantum mechanics saves its strangest trick for last, and that is reality refuses to make up its mind until you look.

This is one of my favourites, and you can easily amaze your family and friends with it. This is the famous double-slit experiment, and it works like this.

If you fire particles through two narrow openings and don’t measure which slit they pass through, the resulting pattern suggests each particle behaves as if it travelled through both slits simultaneously.

Measure which slit it used and the pattern changes completely and the wave-like behaviour disappears and suddenly the particle acts as though it picked a side all along.

This doesn’t mean consciousness magically creates reality, despite what countless internet memes may suggest. What it does mean is observation and measurement play an extraordinarily deep role in quantum mechanics.

The universe, at its most fundamental level, appears less interested in giving definite answers than we would like, and it behaves more like a collection of probabilities than a collection of certainties.

Which is either fascinating or deeply irritating, depending on how much sleep you’ve had.

As I said, you can amaze your friends with this one, and I first saw this demonstrated in a physics class in high school many, many moons ago. All you need is a laser pointer and a couple of perfectly parallel holes in a piece of cardboard. Copy and paste this into google and it will show you how:

Can you do your own double slit experiment with cardboard and a laser pointer?

Let’s link these all together.

At first glance, these facts seem unrelated.  One is about black holes. One is about empty space. One is about neutron stars. One is about dark matter. One is about quantum mechanics.

But they all point toward the same uncomfortable conclusion. Reality is under no obligation whatsoever to resemble common sense.

Black holes glow. Nothingness isn’t empty. Matter can become unimaginably dense. Most of the universe appears invisible. And particles sometimes behave as if they’ve forgotten how choosing works.

Hawking radiation sits right in the middle of this collection of cosmic absurdities. It exists because gravity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and information theory all collide at the edge of a black hole.

And every time physicists dig deeper into that collision, the universe responds with another fact that sounds fake, isn’t fake, and somehow makes everything even stranger.

I tell ya. You simply cannot win with Physics. Sort one thing out and it throws a spanner in the works.

The Speed of Light: The Universe’s Ultimate Limit

Posted on by
1

Due to another recent sleepless night thanks to my mind working in overdrive, I found myself contemplating the speed of light, and the more I contemplated it, the more it wouldn’t let me go back to sleep, and the stranger it seemed.

It’s one of those things you hear about your whole life. School, documentaries, random science articles, the closing song to Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, so much so you sort of take it for granted. Light goes very fast. End of story, right?

Er, no. The more I started thinking about it, the more I realised it’s not just about how fast light travels.

It’s something much deeper than that.

So, what actually is the speed of light?

At its most basic level, it’s just a number, but not just any number. It is a number that quietly governs everything in the universe, how fast signals travel, how time flows, how gravity behaves, and even how reality itself is stitched together.

That number is the speed of light, usually written as c.

It’s not just the speed at which sunlight reaches your face or lasers shoot across a room. It goes far deeper than that. It is, in many ways, the fundamental rhythm of reality.

The speed of light in a vacuum is: c = 299,792,458 metres per second.

That’s about 300,000 kilometres per second, or if you prefer it in imperial, 186,000 miles per second, fast enough to go around the Earth more than seven times in a single second.

But here’s the interesting part: this number isn’t just measured, it’s defined. Since 1983, the metre itself has been based on how far light travels in a fraction of a second.

So, in a strange way, we’re not just measuring light, we’re using it to define reality.

Another thing that’s easy to miss is that c isn’t really about light on its own. It’s the speed of all electromagnetic radiation, from radio waves to gamma rays, and even appears in the laws governing phenomena like gravitational waves.

Nothing in the universe can go faster than light. Not matter, not energy, and not information. That’s what gives the universe its speed limit. Why? I hear you ask. And the answer, my friends, is because anything with mass accelerating toward c will require more and more energy. To actually reach it would require infinite energy, which is impossible.

The speed of light is therefore not just fast, it is absolute.

This is where Einstein comes in. Back in 1905 he made a radical leap. He proposed that the speed of light is the same for all observers, no matter how fast they themselves are moving.

That seemingly simple idea shattered classical physics to smithereens (I might be being a bit over dramatic there) and led to the theory of special relativity, and with it came strange and beautiful consequences: time slows down for objects moving near light speed, and length shrinks in the direction of motion. Mass and energy turned out to be two sides of the same coin too, which gives us the most famous equation of all:

E=mc2E = mc^2


In that one brilliant moment, the speed of light became more than just a velocity. It became a statement about how we see the universe itself: because light travels at a fixed speed, we never see the universe as it is, only as it was.

So, if you look at the Sun you are seeing it from 8 minutes in the past, the moon is from 1.3 seconds ago, any nearby stars you gaze at are years ago, and if you were to look at distant galaxies, they are from millions or billions of years ago. Amazing, isn’t it? Every time you look into the night sky, you are literally looking into history.

Let’s take a closer look at light, fields, and the deep structure of physics.

In the 19th century, James Clerk Maxwell showed us that light is actually an electromagnetic wave, and its speed comes from the properties of empty space itself, which in itself is a bit mind bending!

Then, in modern quantum physics, we go a step further. Reality, as far as we can tell, is made of fields. Particles are just ripples in those fields, and the speed of light is the maximum speed those ripples can travel. In this view, c is not just about light, it is the speed of all cause-and-effect in the universe.

And this ties into black holes as well (as I was rambling about in my last post). If you make gravity strong enough, you eventually reach a point where the escape velocity equals the speed of light and that’s the event horizon. Beyond that, nothing gets out, not because something is pulling it back in like a cosmic vacuum cleaner, but because spacetime itself is warped in such a way that every possible path leads inward.

What’s that? Another question I hear? Can we go faster than light? No, we can’t, not with the laws of physics as we understand them now. Modern physics is very strict on this; nothing can move through space faster than light.

But the universe does have a trick up its sleeve. Space itself can expand faster than light. Distant galaxies are being carried away faster than light so that some are forever beyond our reach. Crucially, this doesn’t break relativity, because nothing is actually moving through space faster than light, space itself is stretching.

Which leads us to another question: if we could travel faster than light, why would doing so break reality?

And the answer to that question is this: if faster-than-light communication were possible, something extraordinary, and dangerous, would happen. Cause and effect could reverse, which in some reference frames means a message would arrive before it was sent, creating a paradox where an effect precedes its cause.

And this is why physicists think of c not as the speed of light, but as the speed of causality.

Still with me? Good, I’m going to get a bit more technical here and bung in an equation, I try to avoid equations as much as possible as they can be baffling to understand (apart from the one above, obviously), it’s only as I have got older and more learned (hark at me!!) that I am better able to get my head around them.

Anyway, the speed of light also appears in one of physics’ most mysterious numbers, The fine-structure constant:

α≈1137\alpha \approx \frac{1}{137}


It basically shows us how strongly electromagnetism works, and it depends on the speed of light, along with quantum mechanics and electric charge and other quantumy stuff. Anyway, together these constants define how atoms hold together, how chemistry works, and ultimately how anything exists at all, but that is for another blog post, so you’ll just have to take my word for it for now.

All this brings us to the one final mystery which nobody really has an answer to. Why this number? Why does the speed of light have this exact value? We know how to measure it. We can use it. We know it shapes spacetime itself. But why that value?

At the deepest level, where quantum mechanics meets gravity, we still don’t know. Remember, I’m just an amateur here and I definitely have no idea. However, some theories suggest spacetime may emerge from something deeper, and that c might emerge with it.

Putting all this into perspective (and adding some cool bullet points), the speed of light is:

  • The maximum speed of information
  • The structure of spacetime
  • The limit of cause and effect
  • A link between energy, mass, space, and time

It is not just a property of light. It is a property of reality itself. How’s that for a statement?

But wait, it gets even better as perhaps the strangest thing of all is that every single moment, everything in the universe is obeying that limit.

Whether we notice it or not, the future is only ever unfolding as fast as light allows.

A thought experiment about how advanced civilisations might preserve knowledge. Not through communication, but through persistence

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been thinking about the Fermi Paradox again recently, that slightly uncomfortable question about why, if intelligent life is likely in the universe, we don’t seem to have any real evidence of it.

For decades, the search has mostly focused on listening. Radio signals, communication, signs that something out there is trying to make itself known. So far, despite years of searching we have nothing definitive.

This got me wondering whether we’ve been looking for the wrong thing entirely. If you look at what we’re doing as a civilisation, there’s been a noticeable shift.

We’re getting very good at storing information by placing huge amounts of data in tiny physical space. We have materials designed to last for extremely long periods (fused silica, for example), and more recently, even starting to think about storing data off-world

There are already data payloads on the Moon, essentially early attempts at creating long-term archives beyond Earth. In a similar spirit, earlier missions like Pioneer 10 and 11 even carried engraved plaques, simple, durable messages intended to outlast the spacecraft themselves and potentially be understood by any intelligence that might encounter them.

Because we are sending these data stores to the moon, it feels like a subtle but important step, it suggests something quite different about where technology might be heading. Not outward and loud, but inward and durable.

So, I had this idea, and my thought is this:

What if advanced civilisations don’t broadcast signals, those huge technosignatures and radio communications that SETI have been searching for? What if they leave records instead?

Rather than trying to communicate across vast distances, they might create something that simply persists as a kind of long-term archive. If that’s the case, those archives would probably be small and compact. passive (no need for active power), and extremely durable, designed to last for very long periods, and possibly deliberately placed somewhere stable and discoverable.

If you were looking for a place to store something long-term in our solar system, Mars orbit actually starts to make a lot of sense.  It’s relatively quiet compared to Earth orbit as there is less atmospheric drag, fewer large perturbations, and a simpler gravitational environment overall. There’s also the added point that Mars itself likely had a very different past, thicker atmosphere, liquid water, maybe even early-life conditions. So, it’s not just stable, it’s interesting from a biological perspective.

From an engineering standpoint, there are a couple of obvious candidates. Higher Mars orbit (away from atmospheric effects and lower orbital decay), gravitationally stable regions like the Lagrange points (L4 and L5), where objects can remain relatively stable over long periods.

What would we actually see though? If something like this existed, I doubt it would look like a spacecraft in the way we tend to imagine it. It would probably be small. Passive. Unremarkable at first glance. Maybe the sort of things we’d need to look for are:

  • Small objects in unusual but stable orbits
  • Occasional bright reflections, glints, where light catches on a surface
  • Slightly odd thermal behaviour
  • Shapes or edges that don’t quite look natural

In other words, subtle anomalies. Nothing dramatic. Nothing obvious. Just things that don’t quite fit. None of this is especially speculative, it’s just basic orbital mechanics.

One of the most interesting parts of this idea is the possibility that we might already have the data.

We’ve been observing Mars for decades now, with high-resolution imagery, radar data. And thermal measurements, But, all of that work has been focused on the surface, not on systematically looking for small, anomalous objects in orbit. Which means there’s a gap. We might already have the data; we’ve just never really asked this particular question of it.

Is all this actually testable? The answer is yes, and that’s what makes this idea interesting to me.

It’s not just a thought experiment,. It’s something that could be tested, even at a basic level by taking existing Mars datasets and running anomaly detection on them. We can search for anything that looks odd or behaves in an unexpected way while filtering out the obvious stuff such as known spacecraft, debris, noise, etc.

Even if nothing turns up, we’d still learn something about what’s there, and what isn’t.

Why does this matter? I hear you ask. Well, If something like this did exist, even just one confirmed example, it would completely change the situation, because it wouldn’t rely on communication, It wouldn’t rely on timing or distance or whether anyone is still “out there”. It would just be… evidence. At that point, the Fermi Paradox wouldn’t really be about silence anymore, it would be more like: Have we simply not recognised what we’re looking at?

As a final thought, I’m not claiming that there are definitely extraterrestrial archives sitting out there in Mars orbit, but it does feel like one of those ideas that sits right on the edge between speculative and testable. And more importantly:

It’s something we haven’t really looked for.

Given how much data we already have, and how our own technology is evolving — it feels like a question that’s at least worth asking properly, because if those kinds of records did exist, we might not even realise we’re looking at them.

Hypothesis (for clarity)

Advanced extraterrestrial civilisations may prioritise long-term information preservation over visible energetic expansion, and may therefore deploy compact, durable archival systems in stable orbital environments, such as Mars orbit or associated gravitationally stable regions, where such artefacts could plausibly persist over extended timescales and be discoverable through systematic analysis of orbital data.

This is a simplified statement of the idea discussed above.