The Titan Probe is coming 🚀

News from Brandon Q. Morris

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What happens on Enceladus stays on Enceladus?

Not quite. In 2005, the robotic probe “Huygens” lands on Saturn’s moon Titan. 40 years later, a radio telescope receives signals from the far away moon that can only come from the long forgotten lander.

At the same time, an expedition returns from neighbouring moon Enceladus. The crew lands on Titan and finds a dangerous secret that risks their return to Earth. Meanwhile, on Enceladus a deathly race has started that nobody thought was possible. And its outcome can only be decided by the astronauts that are stuck on Titan.

The sequel to "The Enceladus Mission", "The Titan Probe", is now available here:
hard-sf.com/links/301639

I hope you have as much reading it as I had writing it!

Any questions? Would love to hear from you.

Kind regards from my desk!

Brandon Q. Morris

Superflare from a Red Dwarf

2MASS J02365171-5203036 is a rather inconspicuous red dwarf of spectral class M2. It travels through the universe approximately 123 light years from Earth and normally has a luminosity of approximately one-thousandth of that of our Sun’s. On 9 August 2017, however, it experienced an outburst that made it noticeable even in the Hubble Space Telescope’s data: it released energy of 1.3 * 10^32 erg over a very short period of time – for comparison, a typical solar eruption measures approximately 10^27 erg/s.

That is a quantity that corresponds, for example, converted to food energy, to ten billion tons of bread or 100 million gigawatt hours, which was the worldwide energy demand in 2010, released from the Sun in one second. Continue reading →

Four gas giants and a young sun

CI Tau, which is 450 light-years from Earth, is a T-Tauri star – these are stars that are still in their birth phase. Fusion has only recently ignited in its core, and the star is still contracting to its final size. Even though CI Tau is only approximately two million years old, it already has a companion: a “hot Jupiter” that has a mass of eight to ten Jupiters and is orbiting its host star at a close distance.

It was previously thought that at least ten million years were needed to form these conditions. That’s why scientists were surprised when they discovered the companion CI Tau b in 2016. Now they have found even more surprises, because apparently there is not only one, but four planets within the protoplanetary disk surrounding the star, as a team from the University of Cambridge and others has determined with the help of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Continue reading →

The Titan Probe

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How does a wormhole look?

Wormholes are shortcuts through space and time – and up to now purely a product of science fiction and theory. More precisely, their existence can only be deduced and calculated from current theories. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they actually exist. And it certainly doesn’t mean that they can be used to travel through space. But what would they look like and what shape would they have? This has been calculated by the Ukrainian physicist Roman Konoplya – or more precisely: he has shown how the shape of a wormhole can be calculated from its physical data. Continue reading →

This is Hyperion!

The vast expanse of the universe has one advantage: because the light from the farthest reaches of the universe takes so long to get to us, astronomers can gain insight into its early history. Scientist’s latest discovery: galaxy superclusters apparently formed relatively early – as shown by one structure that scientists have named “Hyperion.” The gigantic proto-supercluster was identified by a team of astronomers led by Olga Cucciati from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF) Bologna (Italian Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna) with the VIMOS instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). Hyperion, observed approx. 2.3 billion years after the big bang, is the largest and most massive structure yet discovered so early in the creation of the universe. Continue reading →

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