Every year, you can ring in the new year by going out at midnight and finding the dazzling star Sirius, sometimes called the New Year’s Star. In 2025, Sirius will be joined by the bright planets Jupiter and Mars. And of course, the bright constellation Orion the Hunter makes them easy to find. You can’t … Read more
“All Good Things”, “What You Leave Behind”, “Endgame”… Now “The New Next Generation” becomes the latest addition to the pantheon of memorable “Star Trek” season finales, as the franchise’s only out-and-out comedy, “Lower Decks”, goes out in style. After last week’s multiverse-hopping adventures, the race is on to save the prime universe from a fissure … Read more
New research may have delivered bad news for scientists who thought they had discovered a “missing link” black hole in a dense Milky Way star cluster. The new findings imply that, rather than a rare intermediate-mass black hole, there is a cluster of stellar-mass black holes in Omega Centauri, believed to be the remains of … Read more
Skeleton Crew continues to be the rare sort of on-screen Star Wars that’s content with just doing its own thing. Somehow, we’re already at the halfway point of the season, and while we’re still crossing our fingers that a deepfaked Luke Skywalker doesn’t show up to derail this fun romp with a link to the … Read more
This image gazes toward the heart of the Milky Way, in the direction of its core. Credit: ESO/S. Guisard (www.eso.org/~sguisard) Veiled in gas and clouds, the Milky Way’s center does not easily give up secrets. The initial detection of its supermassive black hole (SMBH) decades ago posed as many riddles as it solved, including the … Read more
Ever wondered what happened to Bradward Boimler’s transporter duplicate? We already knew his death was faked by Section 31 and now we know the reason why: he’s leaping between multiverses as if he’s Doctor Strange, trying to stop whatever — or whoever — is tearing rifts between dimensions. And who else to accompany him on … Read more
Skeleton Crew, the latest live-action Star Wars show on Disney Plus, debuted last week with a pretty fun and uncomplicated two-episode premiere. In its third chapter, we get to venture further into a swashbuckling adventure full of scallywags and alien locales. But, more surprisingly, we also obtain more answers than we’d expected this early on. … Read more
The latest “Lower Decks” episode, “Upper Decks”, reveals what the command crew gets up to when Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn aren’t hogging all that main character energy. So, as the lead quintet gets busy “mutilating gourds” for Halloween — everyone but T’Lyn would describe it as carving pumpkins — “Upper Decks” shows that … Read more
All those spaceships, droids, lightsabers, and scoundrels had a big part to play in capturing the imaginations of a generation back in 1977. Even so, there’s a much subtler moment that arguably defines the original ‘Star Wars’ movie better than any other. Young farmer Luke Skywalker, told by his uncle that he needs to stay … Read more