
Keith Cooper
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

Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' pushes for crewed moon missions, but proposed budget cuts leave NASA science behind
By Keith Cooper published
The U.S. government's "One, Big Beautiful Bill" Act finds funding for Artemis and Lunar Gateway, but nearly half of NASA's science missions are on the chopping block ahead of the 2026 budget.

'Pebble' beaches around young stars join together to form planets
By Keith Cooper published
Planetary construction sites around other stars are filled with pebbles, and for the first time radio telescopes have detected these tiny chunks of rock that stick together to form planets.

Scientists discover ice in space isn't like water on Earth after all
By Keith Cooper published
Scientists had assumed that the ice in space was purely amorphous, but new experiments show it can have a partly crystalline structure similar to ice on Earth.

NASA's asteroid-crash Earth defense tactic has a complication — DART ejected large boulders into space
By Keith Cooper published
"You can think of it as a cosmic pool game. We might miss the pocket if we don't consider all the variables."

The ocean on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus has the right pH for life — barely
By Keith Cooper published
"We know that some microbes on Earth can tolerate the range of pH found on Enceladus."

How your smartphone is powered by debris from a nova star explosion
By Keith Cooper published
The discovery could explain why younger stars seem to have more lithium than the Big Bang theory says they should have.

NASA teaches Mars orbiter to roll over in quest to find Red Planet water
By Keith Cooper published
The spacecraft now almost tips upside down relative to Mars to give its radar the best view.

US military cuts climate scientists off from vital satellite sea-ice data
By Keith Cooper published
In the latest attack on science by the Trump administration, researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center will no longer receive data from a fleet of military satellites.

Biting the 'Bullet': Amazing new JWST photo shows titanic collision of galaxy clusters
By Keith Cooper published
It's another step on the road to one day discovering what dark matter could be.

By locking its greenhouse gas away in rocks, Mars gradually grew cooler and drier
By Keith Cooper published
As the sun grew hotter, so did Mars, prompting much of its atmospheric carbon dioxide to rain out and ultimately get locked up in rocks.

'Like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice': How a surprise mineral could change the history of asteroid Ryugu
By Keith Cooper published
"Its occurrence is like finding a tropical seed in Arctic ice – indicating either an unexpected local environment or long-distance transport in the early solar system."

Cosmic images from the world's largest digital camera are so big they require a 'data butler'
By Keith Cooper published
The amount of data generated by the Rubin Observatory is going to blow all previous cosmic datasets out of the water, but handling that much information poses a severe challenge.

Moon dust is less toxic than urban air pollution, scientists discover
By Keith Cooper published
Breathing in moon dust can still give you what one astronaut called "lunar hay fever."

50 years later, Apollo 17’s moon samples are still revealing secrets about lunar volcanoes
By Keith Cooper published
The beads are over 3.3 billion years old, and date from the formation of the "Man in the Moon."

Star-forming cloud Chamaeleon I looks like a cosmic masterpiece in new Dark Energy Camera image (video)
By Keith Cooper published
Part of the closest star-forming region to us, known as the Chamaeleon Complex, has been illuminated by the light of young stars in this artwork by nature captured by the Dark Energy Camera.

Pluto's hazy skies are making the dwarf planet even colder, James Webb Space Telescope finds
By Keith Cooper published
Simultaneously cooling Pluto while energizing atmospheric molecules to allow them to escape into space, Pluto's haze plays a key role in the planet's energy balance.

A hidden 'super-Earth' exoplanet is dipping in and out of its habitable zone
By Keith Cooper published
With 10 times the mass of our planet, and spending only part of its orbit in the habitable zone, Kepler-725c is very different to Earth.

A tiny star gave birth to a giant exoplanet, but no one knows how
By Keith Cooper published
A giant exoplanet is surprisingly chill given how close it is to its red dwarf star — perhaps because the star is so little.

Europe stages a moon landing to learn how to photograph the real thing (photos)
By Keith Cooper published
Built on a set in a specialist facility in Germany, a mockup of a lunar landscape is helping imaging experts learn how to take better images and video footage on the moon.

What's at the center of Mars? Maybe the stench of rotten eggs
By Keith Cooper published
The core of the Red Planet may be filled with sulfur.

Scientists found a possible new dwarf planet — it could spell bad news for Planet 9 fans
By Keith Cooper published
A newly found object could be a dwarf planet that contradicts the Planet Nine hypothesis.

James Webb Space Telescope discovers an alien planetary system's icy edge
By Keith Cooper published
The presence of water-ice in the debris disk around a young star could have helped facilitate the growth and development of exoplanets.

Why scientists are so excited about the highest-energy 'ghost particle' ever seen
By Keith Cooper published
Scientists have found a neutrino that could come from a gamma-ray burst, an active black hole or a collision between a cosmic ray and photons in the cosmic microwave background.

China is sharing priceless moon samples with international partners, but NASA can't be a part of it
By Keith Cooper published
The Wolf Amendment, a law that prevents bilateral cooperation in space research between the U.S. and China, is preventing U.S. government-funded analysis of the Chang'e 5 moon samples.
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