Does anyone know if it is expected to move into northern hemisphere skies as it moves further away from the Sun?

The night sky was absolutely stunning in these parts last night - so clear and bright and shiny.

Anyone else been watching Stargazing Live on BBC the last couple of nights? I've been pretty impressed - some fairly high-brow stuff (especially in the follow-up discussion program) in amongst Prof Cox's ever expanding ego. He certainly has zero tolerance for astrology, CTs and UFOlogy. Quite amussing to see his reactions when these subjects have come up.

I've always disliked Cox but I thought he was good on SG live. Funny. He is quite rightly skeptical of all those things you mentioned. I liked it when he told people to turn over and watch ITV if they believed in aliens visiting the Earth.

He's very funny on Infinite Monkey Cage (Radio 4 program). Laughingly dismisses every scientific discipline except his own too. Came a cropper once by having a go at philosophy, until someone pointed out that he'd just also dismissed mathematics, the framework physics most depends on

I do like Cox's sense of humour and his way of communicating science but I think he's getting a bit up himself these days. He has an obvious allegiance to all things Manchester (fair enough) but he has an obvious distain for everywhere else which is immature. I also find it strange that he's found fame popularising astronomy when his field of expertise is particle physics. That said SG Live has been very good this year. I laughed out loud when they talked about the editorial process they had to go through when they planned to point the radio telescope at the exo-panet just in case they actual picked up a signal. Very ammusing.

The exo-planet they discovered over the course of the last 3 days and have 'officially' named after the discoverers got me thinking... I've got a star 'officially' named after me ('officially - totally un-officialy from the International Star Rigistry which I'm sure have no official capacity what-so-ever). If they discover an exo-planet and that turned out to be inhabited... could i claim back-rent?

Astrology?.....what does that rubbish have to do with Astronomy?

I've been recording it, and have only seen the first one so far...

Anything that sparks an interest in a larger audience is all good, especially when it also raises an awareness of light pollution. It's really quite sad that so many people never get to see a pristine night sky.

True. But in my experience so few people take the time to just 'look up' when there is a clear sky. We've been blessed by some fantasticly clear skies so far this winter and Jupiter has been so blatantly obvious in the evening sky. it's been a perfect opportunity for the uninitiated to be introduced to the woeders of the skies. Thankfully my daughter seems to be taking an interest and is pretty adept and spotting Jupiter now. It helps when I can weave an interesting story around the constellations I point out to her ("Mummy, we just saw Princess Andromeda").

Did anyone catch the Christmas lecture Prof Cox gave from the RA? That was quite good, one of the best explanations of the basics of particle physics I've seen. It was quite clear that this was Cox's 'home territory' and I'd like to see him do some more programs in this area rather than just sticking to the TV friendly astronomy.

Anyone heard that theory about life more advanced than us probably not existing?

It goes that at some point we will develop craft that can traverse space and visit other planets. The ships would be automated, sent in advance to mine resources, set up colonies and then replicate themselves. These replicated ships would then repeat the process indefinetely.

The theory goes that quite quickly, these ships could explore every corner of our galaxy and that the fact we haven't seen any yet proves there's no hyper intelligent alien races in our galaxy.

Now to me this theory has all sorts of issues and I'm not saying I believe it but it's interesting nonetheless.

There are many issues with this theory. Firstly, to quote Douglas Adams...

Add in the timescales involved and it is quite possible that someone has already done this in the past and the ships long since visited, that someone from very far away has already started this and the ships just aren't here yet or are going in a different direction even as they replicate, or that someone advanced enough has taken the Dune approach and decided that sentience should be limited to only organic lifeforms so will never do this. We also know so little about our own star system. Who's to say that one of these ships hasn't mined out a few asteroids with the evidence sat there waiting for us to see it? And what if the ships themselves are actually quite small? Would we even see them?

Surely that's just a reworking for the Fermi paradox.

To me the main issue is this; at the current rate of advancement, specifically in the area of exo-planet detection, we will have a pretty clear picture of the population of planets out to several thousand light years in the next decade or so. In a century or two, well before we are in any position to start sending probes out to the nearest stars, we will have been able to map with a high level of accuracy a fairly large chunck of the galaxy. If there are any planets that harbour life in that volume of space we will know. If there are any planets that show the slightest sing of harbouring an industrially advanced civilisation (i.e. pollutants in the atmosphere) we will know. Therefore if and when we choose to send probes to these places we will make 100% sure they will be zero impact i.e. they will never come into contact with the life we expect to find.

Turn that around - any advanced alien species sending out probes to investigate other star systems will have known long before that our system harbours life and that for the last few centuries there is an advanced species (so if this hypothetical alien species lives within a couple of hundred LY's they will have detected this), so they will most likely have made sure these probes have no chance of 'contaminating' the subject worlds they are sent to study. In the same way that the Gallileo probe was deliberately crashed into Jupiter rather than take the very small risk it might hit Europa and contaminate any life there, any probes sent to our system by aliens would hang around the periphary and then either self-destruct or fall into the sun. We'd certainly never know they were there.

It is odd though. You would think this would be a viable way to explore and populate the galaxy. A ship travelling at just 1% of light speed could make it to our nearest star in a few hundred years and using nuclear pulse propulsion or some other novel system it could be even faster.

Now considering the time spans that are still involved automated ships would be the way forward. Isn't it also estimated now that there are more planets than stars? So there should be plenty of resources for these ships to replicate and leapfrog to the next system, multiplying in number as they go and finding more resources.

I think it is a presumption that all intelligent life would be courteous enough to self destruct probes or even expect to find intelligent life.

Right now the question of life 'out there' seems to be growing in importance both within science and within the mass consciousness. As was speculated last night, the chances are we'll get observational evidence of life on an exo-planet via spectroscopy before we find evidence of life within our own solar system. Finding evidence of life outside the solar system will be the single most important scientific discovery of all time, but it won't actually answer the real reason for the question of life elswhere.

The question is actually, 'are we alone?' Finding life, whether it be simple microbial life on Europa or more complex life on an exo-planet does not really answer that question. You might live next to a rubbish tip teaming with life but you're still alone as an advanced, intelligent species. What we're looking for is someone to talk to. That opens up a whole other area of speculation, though.

Last night Prof Cox made a fairly sweeping statement about 'intelligent life' - that in the 500 milllion year history of complex life on Earth the 'eye' has evolved totally seperately a dozen times or more while 'intelligence' has only evolved once, in humans. I'd challenge him on his definition of 'intelligence'. I'd say most biologists would argue there are several intelligent species alive right now (other primates, aquatic mamals, some bird species) - we just use our intelligence in a different way to them. It's also totally impossible to say that no other intelligent species has ever developed before on Earth. Intelligence does not necessarily lead to technological advancement and if humanity was destroyed tomorrow just how much evidence of us would last 100 million years? 50 years ago the answer would have been nothing. Even if dinasours sent probes to the Moon 100 million years ago, after that amount of time exposed to the solar wind and micro-meteorite impacts would we recognise the left-overs (OK, I'm getting silly now, but you get my point)?

It might well turn out that the sort of intelligence humans have is an evolutionary dead-end, an accidental by-product of other evolutionary changes our ancestors went through which inevitably leads the the premature decline of the species. We might find a universe out there teaming with complex ecosystems and lots of intelligent life but no-one to talk back to us.

That's one thing we need to consider as well. We don't yet have a method of communicating with dolphins and whales, although each species is clearly sending complex communications to others of its kind in a form of language. Surely we'll face similar problems should we encounter aliens. Short of standing and counting numeric series at each other what further communication would we really achieve?

The point is whales and dolphins clearly don't have an advanced understanding of science and maths (at least if they do they don't use it for anything obvious) where as if we find another species to communicate with we'll recognise them as such becuase of their mastery of technology and therefore their obvious understanding of science and maths. This will form the basis of 'tlaking' to them and yes, it will start with very simple '1+1=2' but will pretty quickly build up, especially if we use computers to do the talking. The bit that will take a long time will be the journey time for any message between the stars.

computer programmers know that 1+1=10

Ooh, a binary joke there!

Another good point. What if they have 6 fingers on each hand (if they have hands of course) and count in base 12 as a result?

At least they'd be good at understanding Earth time

The assumption is that no matter what base they use generally, if they've developed computers the chances are they will understand binaryand we can start from there.

In an email received today, my friend suggested "there's talk of an especially expressive Northern lights show tonight - hope the skies will clear for a while. At 10pm GMT +/- 7 hours. A consequence a sunspot exploding during the week."

Anyone heard similar?

This galaxy alone is so vast (some 200 billion stars), let alone the rest of the universe, that there are almost certainly other tool using civilisations within this very Milky Way Galaxy right now and some of those civilisations will no doubt be significantly ahead of Earth in terms of technology, speceflight, etc. Indeed, the eminent astronomer Harlow Shapley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlow_Shapley went on record as saying that there was other life in the Universe.

The question is not whether but how many such civilisations there are in this galaxy and the astronomer Frank Drake http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Drake tried to rationally quantify the number of civilisations with his Drake equation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation. For example, it's quite possible that there could be hundreds to thousands of other civilisations present but they would still be relatively few and far between because of the huge scale of the galaxy.

It is feasible, but not too likely. The further north you are, the greater the possibility, but still there are no guarantees.

If this graph should shoot up to a high value (greater than about 7) than the northern parts could see something, but 9 would be needed in the south of England.

Thanks for the info and the pointer to the K index plot albertd. I'll get to see one one day I hope.

I did actually manage to 'use' an aurora many years ago...

Well, it has finally started going up (4 at the moment). Hope it doesn't race up to the top during daylight!!