Through the Sound Barrier with the X-1, part 2Dave Darling2026-09-23 | Through the Sound Barrier with the X-1, part 2New insights on the Hand of GodDave Darling2025-08-23 | In 2009, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released a curious image: a pulsar and its surrounding nebula that’s shaped like a hand. Since then, astronomers have used Chandra and other telescopes to continue to observe this object. Now, new radio data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), has been combined with Chandra’s X-ray data to provide a fresh view of this exploded star and its environment, to help understand its peculiar properties and shape.
A paper describing this work, led by Shumeng Zhang of the University of Hong Kong, with co-authors Stephen C.Y. Ng of the University of Hong Kong and Niccolo’ Bucciantini of the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics, has been published in The Astrophysical Journal and is available at iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adf333.A new kind of supernovaDave Darling2025-08-18 | Astronomers have discovered what may be a massive star exploding while trying to swallow a black hole companion, offering an explanation for one of the strangest supernovae ever seen.
Source: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/ai-helps-astronomers-discover-new-type-supernovaThe Cosmic Horseshoe Black HoleDave Darling2025-08-16 | Astronomers have discovered one of the most massive black holes ever detected. The cosmic monster is close to the theoretical upper limit of what’s possible in the universe.
Source: ras.ac.uk/news-and-press/research-highlights/most-massive-black-hole-ever-discovered-detectedEvidence for a gas giant around Alpha Centauri ADave Darling2025-08-09 | Astronomers have used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to find strong evidence for a planet orbiting a star in the triple system closest to our own Sun. At just 4 light-years away from Earth, the Alpha Centauri star system has long been a compelling target in the search for worlds beyond our solar system called exoplanets.
Source: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/evidence-found-for-planet-around-closest-sun-like-starIs dark energy getting weaker?Dave Darling2025-03-20 | Ever since the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago, a battle has been taking place. On the one hand, gravity, acting between all the matter in the universe, has been working to slow down cosmic expansion. On the other, dark energy, which permeates all of space, has been acting in the other direction to make the universe expand faster. For several decades, scientists have widely believed that dark energy must eventually win and doom the universe to eternal expansion. But recent results have challenged this view.The science behind vampiresDave Darling2024-10-25 | It being Halloween season, I thought you might enjoy this (scientific) take on a spooky subject - vampires :-).Journey to EuropaDave Darling2024-10-23 | On October 14th, the largest planetary spacecraft ever built was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. NASA’s Europa Clipper has begun a 6-year journey to one of the four big moons of Jupiter.An intermediate-mass black hole in Omega Centauri?Dave Darling2024-08-04 | Seven stars at the heart of the giant globular cluster Omega Centauri are moving so fast, Hubble observations have shown, that it may be that only an intermediate-mass black hole can keep them from escaping.The Future Circular Collider: a step closer to realityDave Darling2024-02-09 | CERN is pressing ahead with plans to build a colossal new particle collider on the Swiss-French border. The Future Circular Collider (FCC) would be more than 3 times the size of the Large Hadron Collider – the machine used to discover the Higgs boson in 2012.The fastest computers in the world, year by yearDave Darling2024-01-18 | The fastest computers in the world, year by year, from 1961 to the present.LHS 3154b: the planet thats too big for its starDave Darling2023-12-04 | Astronomers have found a planet, called LHS 3154b, that seems to be far too big for the star that it’s going around. The planet in question is at least 13 times as massive as Earth but it orbits a star that weighs 9 times less than the Sun. The discovery seems to fly in the face of current theories of planet formation.
My website: daviddarling.infoHD110067: the perfect planetary systemDave Darling2023-11-30 | Astronomers have discovered what they’re describing as the “perfect solar system” – six planets orbiting their star in gravitational lockstep. These half-dozen worlds go around the Sun-like star HD 110067, which lies about 100 light-years away.
My website: daviddarling.infoCosmic voids: the loneliest places in the universeDave Darling2023-11-28 | Voids are the vast, bubble-like regions between cosmic walls and filaments. They’re the emptiest parts of the universe – although not entirely empty.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe Amaterasu particle: ultra-high-energy cosmic ray from the voidDave Darling2023-11-25 | The second most powerful cosmic ray ever found has been detected by a telescope array in the West Desert of Utah. Named the Amaterasu particle after the Sun goddess in Japanese mythology, it had an energy of 2.4 million trillion electronvolts, equivalent to that of a golf ball travelling at 95 miles per hour. Only the Oh-My-God particle, detected 30 years earlier, packed a bigger punch.
My website: daviddarling.infoFermionsDave Darling2023-11-22 | All elementary particles belong to one of two great families: the fermions and the bosons. I dealt with bosons in another video, so this one is devoted to fermions, which were named by Paul Dirac after Enrico Fermi.
My website: daviddarling.infoColliers magazine on the conquest of spaceDave Darling2023-11-19 | On March 22nd, 1952, an issue of Collier’s magazine went on sale in the US that sparked widespread public interest in rocketry and space travel. A series of six lavishly-illustrated articles set out a future, based on science not science fiction, in which humans would build a space station in Earth orbit and then journey on to the Moon and Mars. “Man will conquer space soon!” the magazine proclaimed and the American public, energised by what they saw and read, quickly got behind the idea.
My website: daviddarling.infoIs the Large Hadron Collider good value for money?Dave Darling2023-11-18 | Should we be spending billions of dollars on projects such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Future Circular Collider that further our knowledge of the universe but may have few immediate practical benefits?
My website: daviddarling.infoThe Tasmanian Devil: surprising behaviour of a luminous fast blue optical transientDave Darling2023-11-17 | A team of astronomers has reported that an LFBOT known as the Tasmanian Devil flashed brilliantly again in December 2022 and then again and again – a total of 14 times over a 120-day period, each event lasting only minutes.
Repeated flashes like this haven’t been seen before in LFBOTs.
My website: daviddarling.infoWASP 107b: an extraordinary world where it rains sandDave Darling2023-11-16 | WASP-107b is a strange an exotic planets with scorching temperatures, raging winds, an atmosphere that smells of burnt matches, and clouds of silicate sand.
My website: daviddarling.infoGeneration ships: slow-boats to the starsDave Darling2023-11-15 | If you don’t have the means to move anywhere near the speed of light and you want to send people to the stars, how can you do it? One way would be in a generation ship – an immense, relatively slow-moving spacecraft, also known as an interstellar ark, aboard which many generations would live and die on a voyage across the light-years.
My website: daviddarling.infoEdwin Abbott and FlatlandDave Darling2023-11-14 | Edwin Abbott was an English theologian, educator, and author, born in London in 1838. After a brilliant career at St. John's College, Cambridge, Abbott obtained a fellowship, was master at King Edward's School, Birmingham and at Clifton College, and from 1865 to 1889 was headmaster of the City of London School. During that time he wrote several theological works, a biography of Francis Bacon, and a standard Shakespearian Grammar. But his best-known work is Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, written pseudonymously by A. Square in 1884.
My website: daviddarling.infoPrime numbers: building blocks of the mathematical universeDave Darling2023-11-13 | A prime number is just a natural number that can be divided only by itself and 1, without leaving a remainder. That mightn’t seem like a particularly big deal. But the fact is, prime numbers are the building blocks of the mathematical universe and some of the greatest unsolved mysteries in maths involve primes.
My website: daviddarling.infoRobert Hutchings Goddard: rocket pioneerDave Darling2023-11-13 | Robert Hutchings Goddard was an American physicist and rocket pioneer. Although historians point to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth as being the founders of rocket theory, Goddard, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts, is generally regarded as the father of the practical modern rocket. But it was only after his death that the true value of his work was widely recognised.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe mystery at the heart of the double slit experimentDave Darling2023-11-12 | By the mid-1920s, it was obvious – from the photoelectric effect, the Compton effect, and in other ways – that when light interacts with matter it does so as if it were made of tiny bullets of energy called photons. The rest of the time it goes about as if it were smeared out in the form of a wave. Apparently, light had an identity crisis, and nowhere was that crisis more evident than in an updated version of an experiment carried out long before quantum theory came on the scene.
My website: daviddarling.infoLeptonsDave Darling2023-11-11 | Fundamental particles of matter come in two forms: leptons and quarks. A big difference between them is that, unlike quarks, leptons don’t take part in strong interactions. They’re subject to gravity, the weak force, and, if they’re charged, electromagnetism, but they don’t experience the strong force.
My website: daviddarling.infoRed dwarfs and their planetsDave Darling2023-11-10 | Red dwarfs are the smallest, dimmest, coolest, and most common, type of main-sequence star in the universe. Main sequence means that they’re still making heat and light by fusing hydrogen into helium in their cores. The characteristic properties of red dwarfs stem from their low mass, which ranges from less than a tenth to about a half that of the Sun.
My website: daviddarling.infoLucys first asteroid flyby reveals something no one was expectingDave Darling2023-11-09 | NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, launched on October 16th, 2021, is on a 12-year mission to explore 11 different asteroids. Its ultimate goal is to study 8 Jupiter Trojans – asteroids that move in the same orbit as Jupiter around the Sun. But along the way it will also target 3 other asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.
My website: daviddarling.infoDistant black hole is surprisingly massiveDave Darling2023-11-09 | One of the most distant supermassive black holes ever seen has been discovered using a combination of NASA space telescopes – the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the James Webb Space Telescope.
My website: daviddarling.infoBosonsDave Darling2023-11-08 | Scientists currently recognise two main types of particles in the universe: bosons and fermions. And the property that distinguishes between them is spin – not spin in the ordinary sense but something that’s analogous to it in quantum mechanics. Bosons have a spin that’s an integer multiple of quantum units of angular momentum: 0, 1, 2, and so on. Fermions have an odd half-integer amount of spin, for example, ½ and 3/2.
My website: daviddarling.infoQuarks: a quick introductionDave Darling2023-11-07 | All matter is composed of two types of fundamental particles: quarks and leptons. Quarks are the building blocks of hadrons, the two best-known examples of which are protons and neutrons. Hadrons that are made of 3 quarks, such as protons and neutrons, are known as baryons. Hadrons that are made of 2 quarks – a quark and an antiquark – are called mesons.
My website: daviddarling.infoKepler-385: An extraordinary 7-planet systemDave Darling2023-11-06 | A new catalog of around 4,400 exoplanet candidates and 700 multi-planet systems has been created from observations made by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope before its retirement in 2018. Among the highlights of the catalog is an extraordinary system of seven planets that orbit around a Sun-like star called Kepler-385.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice BurroughsDave Darling2023-11-05 | American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known as the creator of Tarzan of the Apes. Beginning in 1914 he wrote a couple of dozen books about the hero of the jungle and sold more than 25 million copies. But his first published piece had a very different setting.
My website: daviddarling.infoNERVA: Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle ApplicationDave Darling2023-11-04 | NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) started in 1961 with the goal of developing a nuclear-powered rocket engine that could take a crewed spacecraft to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe loudest plane ever: The ThunderscreechDave Darling2023-11-04 | A jet airliner taking off can be tremendously loud if you’re less than 100 metres away. But, strange as it may seem, the loudest aircraft ever built was propeller-driven. It was the XF-84H, nicknamed the ‘Thunderscreech’, an experimental plane derived from the F-84 Thunderstreak and manufactured by Republic Aviation for the US Air Force in the early 1950s.
My website: daviddarling.infoDwarf planetsDave Darling2023-11-03 | In 2006, at the end of a meeting of the International Astronomical Union, several hundred astronomers came up with a new way of classifying objects in the Solar System. Henceforth, there’d be planets, dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies.
My website: daviddarling.infoPlanet Theia and the origin of the MoonDave Darling2023-11-03 | Four and a half billion years ago, so the theory goes, a Mars-sized planet slammed into the embryonic Earth. In the giant collision, the Moon was formed. The remains of the alien intruder world may lie deep below our feet.
My website: daviddarling.infoDo we need to be worried about invading aliens?Dave Darling2023-11-02 | One of the great themes of science fiction, from H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds to Independence Day is the invasion of Earth by smart, powerful aliens bent on taking over our planet. It’s a great theme because it’s terrifying, perfect for dramatic development and acts of heroism, and just about believable.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe protonDave Darling2023-11-02 | Protons are one of the building blocks of atoms along with neutrons and electrons. One or more protons are present in the nucleus of every atom, providing the attractive central electrostatic force that binds the atomic electrons.
My website: daviddarling.infoIts the end of the world - again!Dave Darling2023-11-01 | We live in a quiet backwater of an ordinary, middle-aged spiral galaxy, circling one of the more sedate kinds of stars, on the surface of a stunningly life-friendly planet. Nature has dealt us a very kind hand. But that doesn’t mean we’re completely safe or that can afford to be complacent. In fact, if some folk are to be believed, disaster looms around every corner.
My website: daviddarling.infoPulsars: beacons of spaceDave Darling2023-10-23 | Pulsars are the lighthouses of the Galaxy. When the first one was discovered, in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell at Cambridge, astronomers jokingly called it LGM for “little green men”. But it was soon realised that pulsars are a natural phenomenon – fast-spinning, highly magnetised neutron stars that send out regular directional pulses of radiation as they whirl around.
My website: daviddarling.infoJoseph Walker and the X-15Dave Darling2023-10-22 | Of all the dozens of X-planes that have been built only one, the X-15, has achieved a similar, legendary status to the X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. The X-15 was also a rocket-plane but instead of maxing out at 2½ times the speed of sound, it eventually reached more than Mach 6 and flew so high that for minutes at a stretch, on some missions, it wasn’t an aircraft but a spacecraft plunging through the near-airless void 50 or 60 miles above the ground.
My website: daviddarling.infoVon Neumann probes: Where are they all?Dave Darling2023-10-21 | In the 1960s the Hungarian-born American mathematician John von Neumann wrote about machines that could make exact copies of themselves. He envisaged a kind of robot equipped with a computer brain that could be programmed to reproduce itself from raw materials taken from its surroundings.
It wasn’t long before some people suggested that von Neumann machines, in the form of robot spacecraft, would be a great way for us to explore the Galaxy.
My website: daviddarling.infointermediate mass black holesDave Darling2023-10-20 | Most black holes that astronomers have found are of two types: formed from a single heavyweight star after its outer parts blew away in a supernova, or the supermassive variety found at the centre of galaxies. But there’s another kind, weighing roughly 100 to thousands of times our Sun's mass. These are intermediate-mass black holes and finding them is no easy matter.
My website: daviddarling.infoA new most-distant and most-powerful fast radio burstDave Darling2023-10-20 | Astronomers have found the most distant and one of the most powerful fast radio bursts, or FRBs, to date. It lies almost 8 billion light-years away and in less than a thousandth of a second gave off more energy than the Sun does in 30 years.
My website: daviddarling.infoElectromagnetism: one of the fundamental forces in natureDave Darling2023-10-19 | Electromagnetism is one of the four fundamental forces in nature. I’ve already made videos on the other three – gravity, the strong force and the weak force, if you’d like to check these out. Electromagnetism is the second strongest of this quartet after the strong force. Two features of it make it unique: it’s the only force that acts between electric charges and it’s the only force that can be both attractive and repulsive.
My website: daviddarling.infoExoplanet WASP 17bDave Darling2023-10-19 | WASP-17b is one of the most unusual exoplanets that astronomers have come across to date. It orbits just 7 million kilometres from the surface of its star – 20 times closer than Earth is to the Sun – and completes an orbit every 3.7 days.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe neutronDave Darling2023-10-18 | Today we know that neutrons are one of the constituents of atoms along with protons and electrons. The existence of a neutral particle that would result from the capture of an electron by a proton was first proposed in 1920 by Ernest Rutherford. Eight years later an experiment was carried out in Germany that marked the first step in the search for this new particle.
My website: daviddarling.infoWhy is the jet emerging from the core of galaxy M87 spawning novae?Dave Darling2023-10-17 | Astronomers have found evidence that high-speed gas in the jet emerging from the core of M87 is causing stars in the inner part of the galaxy to go nova – though why this should be still isn’t clear.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe mystery of Luminous Fast Blue Optical TransientsDave Darling2023-10-16 | Only 7 of them are known and the most recently discovered one has added to the mystery of what they are. I’m talking about Luminous Fast Blue Optical Transients or LFBOTs. As the name suggests, they’re bursts of extraordinarily bright light, mostly in the blue part of the spectrum. They resemble supernovae but are 10 to 100 times brighter and more short-lived, rising and fading in a matter of days rather than weeks or months.
My website: daviddarling.infoThe weak forceDave Darling2023-10-15 | The weak force, also known as the weak nuclear force, is one of the four fundamental forces of nature, along with gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong force. It’s the second weakest of these, after gravity and affects all particles of matter, which are known as fermions, but not force-carrying particles or bosons.