Centauri Dreams

Thinking about a great filter through which a civilization must pass before its survival is assured usually leads to catastrophic scenarios, such as planetary suicide by nuclear war, or climate holocaust (assuming the filter lies ahead of us and not behin

If we couldn't figure out what to call CD-35 2722B b, which I assume is the correct way to refer to the planet-sized object in this red dwarf / brown dwarf/ gas giant system, another planet has a bit of a definitional problem as well. LHS 1140 b is an int

Problems of definition will long be with us as we take ever closer looks at exoplanets. But they're suddenly on everyone's mind because of the detection of what some are calling an 'exomoon' in the system CD-35 2722, found in the constellation Columba. Th

Brown dwarfs occupy the mass regime between planets and stars. In systems containing both a star and a substellar companion (be it a brown dwarf or an exoplanet), a third object orbiting the companion can be called an exosatellite. Exoplanet satellites ca

Building the infrastructure we will need for interstellar exploration requires an imaginative look at today's technologies as applied to distant targets. Indeed, we can leverage the scientific interest in, say, an orbit around each of the ice giants to ex

Self-replicating probes continue to be a controversial subject, just as they were when Frank Tipler up the ante on Michael Hart by invoking them as a way of further tightening the tension of the Fermi Paradox. After all, Tipler had discovered an economic

Frank Tipler jolted the astrophysics community in 1980 when he introduced self-replicating interstellar probes into discussion of the Fermi Paradox. The mathematical model of self-replication came from John von Neumann, and was codified in 1966 (after von