Preview and review
Dear readers,
I hope you had a good start into the new year! I spent the turn of the year in Cuba. It was like a visit to the past, with old, but still beatiful US cars, stately colonial houses (partly decaying) and very nice people. My next research trip will be to Bordeaux (France) in early April. There, with the help of AirZeroG, I will try out how zero gravity really feels. Generally I like to visit all my locations, but with space, you know, it's still difficult. The visit to Bordeaux brings me at least a little closer to that.
Before that, I will spend a few days at the book fair in Leipzig, Germany, together with a few colleagues. One of my latest books ("The Triton Disaster", coming in English in spring) is nominated for a prestigeous award, the Seraph, with four other titles.
Yesterday, I finished writing the third part of my "Death of the Universe" trilogy. "Rebirth", that's the subtitle, was a lot of fun to write, I hope you will like it too. The first part is about to be published in three weeks time from now, you can pre-order it here: hard-sf.com/links/835400
What happened in 2019?
- I published ten new books in English. Luckily, my editors are great to work with.
- The best-selling book was the "The Enceladus Mission", followed by "The Titan Probe" and "The Hole". All three have sold more than 10,000 copies.
- World-wide, more than 400.000 copies of my SF novels have been sold, so you are in good company.
- I replied to about 320 e-mails from English speaking readers world-wide; nearly every day someone asks a question or tells me about his or her life. That's the greatest part of my job. I get to know so many interesting people!
- In autumn I won the Skoutz Award together with my colleague Cliff Allister.
- I visited space related sites in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and Texas.
- The first Spanish translations have been published, starting with "La Misión Encélado"
- The audiobook versions of most of my novels are available (or will be soon) via Podium Publishing and Tantor.
What's to come in 2020, except for the parabolic flight? I can share one interesting project: In late automn, the german TOR subsidiary will publish one of my novels. I gave them time restricted translation rights, so if they don't publish in English soon as well, I can do it myself (and I will). The general target is to have my books available in all languages at nearly the same time.
Warm greetings from my nightly desk.
Sincerely yours
Brandon Q. Morris
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Is the universe repelled by itself?
Does the universe repel itself? That is roughly the idea that researchers from the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad, Russia proposed in a recent paper. Their paper refers to the Casimir effect, which involves a quantum-physics phenomenon that was predicted and also later confirmed by the Dutch scientist Hendrik Casimir. The Casimir effect causes two conductive plates arranged in parallel in a vacuum to be attracted to each other by a force. Continue reading → |
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Hubble detects small clumps of Dark Matter
Dark matter holds galaxies together and gives the visible universe its structure. Even though it makes up about five-sixths of all the mass in the cosmos, to date nobody has been able to figure out what it’s made of. On the other hand, there have been some indications about what dark matter is not made of, but researchers still need to determine if dark matter is hot, cold, or possibly even fuzzy, with the temperature designation here referring to the speed at which the particles of dark matter are moving. NASA’s Hubble telescope has now pushed the probabilities a little closer toward cold dark matter, which is also what the standard cosmological model (Lambda CDM) assumes. Continue reading →
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Did You Miss One?
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Hydrogen diet for Black Holes
Only a billion years after the big bang, there were already galaxies whose centers harbored supermassive black holes several billion times the mass of our Sun. Astronomers know this from observations of far distant quasars and active galaxies. But how were the black holes able to grow so large so quickly? The problem seemed even more complicated, because earlier observations with ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Array, had shown a lot of dust and gas in these early galaxies, which promoted rapid star formation. However, if a lot of stars were created, there would have been little left over to feed a black hole. The solution: the young giants were fed from huge reserves of cold hydrogen gas. Continue reading → |
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