Cosmology

Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren’t bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don’t exist.

A look at both peer-reviewed research and popular science fiction on deep space exploration, with an eye toward interstellar possibilities.

This paper presents methods of orbit transfer for small planetoids from the main belt to the future colonies on Mars using current technologies. The results show that by using nuclear weapon or even kinetic energy weapon (for retrograde bodies) asteroids with masses up to about 100 tons can be moved. Both options assume that asteroid will survive explosion.