Working on the LHC (CERN) The LHC is set to go online in around two months time and the scientific world waits in anticipation for the first results. However, there are a few who are more concerned than excited for the LHC experiments. On Tuesday night, I was kindly asked to join the LHC debate with...

Reconstruction of a muon passing through ATLAS (CERN/LHC) Hold on! ATLAS has already started detecting particles? Yes, indeed it has. Particle collisions don’t only happen inside particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); they happen all the time in the Earth’s atmosphere....

21st Century Waves banner Another week and the space bloggers have been busy! For the 65th instalment of the great Carnival of Space, Dr. Bruce Cordell is our host over at the superb blog 21st Century Waves. Once again, there’s a cosmically rich mix of stellar goodness on show. From Astroengine.com,...

The International Space Station Transits the Sun (© Martin Wagner) Sometimes the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is just too hard to pass up. Yesterday’s APOD features our sunspot-less Sun with a strange shape in the lower left-hand side of the image. On closer inspection suddenly...

Northern leg of the LIGO facility on the Hanford Reservation (LIGO) Six years and nearly 400 million dollars later, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) still hasn’t turned up the evidence for gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are predicted by fundamental Einstein...

The LHC at CERN (CERN) I’ve been captivated by the commotion caused by this summer’s “switch on” of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. Much of the last few month have been focused around a lawsuit that Walter Wagner filed in Honolulu, Hawaii four...

The disk of the Sun as viewed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO/MDI) As you can see, the Sun is keeping quiet, devoid of sunspots. As the world awaits an increase in solar activity to celebrate the onset of a new solar cycle, our closest star keeps a blank face and keeps us guessing. This...

Branson and Rutan inspect Eve at the Mojave Air and Space Port (Virgin Galactic) The new addition to the Virgin Galactic family has been rolled out during an early morning ceremony in the middle of the Californian Mojave Desert. Sir Richard Branson and Burt Rutan proudly showed off “Eve,”...

The termination shock, the point at which the interstellar medium interacts with the heliosphere (NASA) The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) is set for launch in October and it will carry out some pretty cool science when in space. Orbiting Earth 200,000 miles away, IBEX will be on the lookout for...

The Mars walker taking a stroll across the Red Planets surface (AboveTopSecret.com) So the new X-Files movie has been released (awesome), there’s been a surge in alien stories (on YouTube, the most reputable scientific resource), NASA astronauts are citing that UFOs are actually extraterrestrials...