Keith Cooper is a freelance science journalist and editor in the United Kingdom, and has a degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of Manchester. He's the author of "The Contact Paradox: Challenging Our Assumptions in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2020) and has written articles on astronomy, space, physics and astrobiology for a multitude of magazines and websites.
Latest articles by Keith Cooper

See the Butterfly Nebula like never before in this spectacular Gemini South telescope image
By Keith Cooper published
The Butterfly Nebula is a preview of the fate that will befall the sun in about 5 billion years.

NASA's next-gen Roman Space Telescope is surprising scientists with its capabilities. It hasn't even launched yet
By Keith Cooper published
"Asteroseismology with Roman is possible because we don't need to ask the telescope to do anything it wasn't already planning to do."

Evidence of ancient life on Mars could be hidden away in colossal water-carved caves
By Keith Cooper published
Skylights, openings in the surface of Mars that descend down into caves, have been found on Mars, along with signatures for the presence of water ice.

AI helps build the most detailed Milky Way simulation ever, mapping 100 billion stars
By Keith Cooper published
Simulating a billion years using previous best-resolution simulations would take almost 36 years of real computing time.

James Webb Space Telescope captures 'one-of-a-kind' triple star system that looks like a cosmic embryo (image)
By Keith Cooper published
The unique system features two rare Wolf-Rayet stars, and a supergiant companion that is interrupting the flow of the dust shells that the two Wolf-Rayet stars cast off.

Scientists watch supernova shockwave shoot through a dying star for 1st time
By Keith Cooper published
The supernova was the death of a red supergiant star 500 times larger than the sun, in a galaxy just 22 million light-years away.

Does quantum gravity exist? A new experiment has deepened the mystery
By Keith Cooper published
Quantum gravity seeks to unify the theory of general relativity with quantum physics to describe how gravity works at very small scales. But there's a big puzzle surrounding the idea.

Heat leaking from Saturn's ocean moon Enceladus bolsters its case as an abode for life
By Keith Cooper published
Excess heat detected at Saturn moon Enceladus' north pole helps to account for a finely balanced energy budget that keeps the moon's ocean liquefied. What could this mean in the search for life?

JWST makes key detection of complex organic molecules around star in galaxy beyond our Milky Way
By Keith Cooper published
The molecules are building blocks of the chemical precursors of things such as RNA.

Space dust in the Arctic is helping scientists track the climate crisis
By Keith Cooper published
A historical record of Arctic sea ice based on the abundance of cosmic dust in sediments on the sea bed of the Arctic Ocean has revealed how the sea ice responds to climate warming.

The International Space Station will fall to Earth in 2030. Can a private space station really fill its gap?
By Keith Cooper published
We'll lose the ISS pretty soon. What might we lose with it?

Powerful solar storms may help life get going on alien planets. Here's how
By Keith Cooper published
New observations of a volatile young star have shown how infant suns could unleash enough energy to trigger biologically relevant chemical reactions in an orbiting planet's atmosphere.

Could these mysterious flashes of light in 1950s photos be UFOs? Some researchers think so
By Keith Cooper published
Researchers claim flashes of light seen in sky surveys could have been UFOs drawn to Earth by nuclear tests, but more mundane explanations should be explored first.

You won't see interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS zoom closest to the sun on Oct. 30 — but these spacecraft will
By Keith Cooper published
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS will make its closest pass to the sun on Oct. 30, and various spacecraft will be watching, seeking clues about the icy wanderer's chemistry and composition.

1st samples ever collected from the moon's far side could help reveal where Earth got its water
By Keith Cooper published
On Earth, CI chondrites make up only 1% of all meteorites that have been collected, but they may be far more common on the moon.

How compact can a neutron star get before collapsing into a black hole?
By Keith Cooper published
This new analysis could be used to test the physics of quantum chromodynamics in the future.

A doomed planet is being torn up by its 'zombie' white dwarf star — but astronomers don't understand why
By Keith Cooper published
The destroyed planet has spewed material onto the white dwarf's surface, with astronomers detecting 13 different elements originating from the rocky body.

Super-Earth less than 20 light-years away is an exciting lead in the search for life
By Keith Cooper published
The super-Earth exoplanet is "one of the best candidates in the search for an atmospheric signature of life."

Scientists discover new way to grow materials on-demand using crystals and light
By Keith Cooper published
The new technique could one day be used to create less expensive astronomical sensors.

Comet 3I/ATLAS could soon shower NASA's Jupiter probe in charged particles. Will it reveal more about the interstellar invader?
By Keith Cooper published
At the end of October Europa Clipper will fly in line with 3I/ATLAS’ ion tail — but will any of the charged particles reach the spacecraft, and will the spacecraft be ready to receive them?

Chemistry on Saturn's huge moon Titan is even weirder than we thought
By Keith Cooper published
Titan's chemical inventory is believed to bear some resemblance to the prebiotic soup on the early Earth.

For the 1st time, scientists discovered 'heavy water' in a disk forming exoplanets
By Keith Cooper published
V883 Orionis is a young star that formed in the Orion Nebula half a million years ago.

Rule-breaking black hole destroys star in puzzling way: 'This is truly extraordinary'
By Keith Cooper published
The so-called tidal disruption event also produced two puzzling delayed outbursts.

How scientists are using spinning dead stars to find ripples in the fabric of spacetime
By Keith Cooper published
Identifying the gravitational waves from black holes binaries could also make it clearer to detect primordial gravitational waves that date back to inflation at the moment of the Big Bang.

Citizen scientists just discovered the most powerful 'odd radio circle' twins in space we've ever seen
By Keith Cooper published
Three new ORCS – "odd radio circles" – have been found associated with giant, active galaxies, giving astronomers clues as to how these immense, enigmatic structures form.
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