Royal Astronomical Society

What are you supposed to do in a case like that? Well, if you're a technologically advanced civilization, you might think about building a cloaking device for your planet.

Now, that might sound like science fiction, but as Professor David Kipping and I have shown in a brand new paper in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Building a cloaking device for a planet is totally possible.

And in fact, we humans could build a cloaking device for the Earth right now.

So the Kepler Space Telescope has been a spectacularly successful mission.

If we decided that we absolutely did not want to be discovered, we could cloak our presence this way.

Now, this may all sound like science fiction to you, but the progress humanity has made, technological progress humanity has made in the last hundred years, makes it clear that we absolutely do need to be thinking seriously about these kind of questions.

If you're interested in the technical details, I would encourage you Check out our paper published in the monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

And as always, if you like what you see, please subscribe below.

So again, this is just, this is not stuff that's happening on earth, but coming directly from space.

So there's an article from the Royal Astronomical Society that says At least two mass extinctions in Earth's history were likely caused by the devastating effects of nearby supernova explosions, according to a study by researchers at Keele University.

So a supernova is when a star explodes.

The death of a really big, really old star, it explodes, sends out a huge amount of gamma ray bursts out into the universe.

This is the Monocle Daily.

I'm Andrew Muller, and I am joined today by Tira Schubart, journalist and fellow at the Royal Astronomical Society, and Phil Tinline, journalist, documentary maker, author most recently of Ghosts of Iron Mountain.

Hello to you both.

Hello.

But here is the part that really got me thinking.

Now, the deputy director of the Royal Astronomical Society said something that I cannot stop thinking about, to be honest, as I researched about this topic and read the article.

He said that the public has not signed up for having an entirely transformed sky.

And he's absolutely right, because nobody asked us.

As I noted in 2025's podcast about black holes, Sir Arthur Eddington, one of the most respected astronomers of the time, publicly ridiculed Chandrasekhar's work.

At a major meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, Eddington dismissed the idea saying, quote, there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way.

So pretentious.

Imagine being 20 years old, halfway across the world from home, and having your groundbreaking work mocked by one of the top scientists alive.

Project Hephaestus.

Project Hephaestus, second paper published 2024 in monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

They ran a pipeline over about 5 million objects, combining Gaia with two infrared surveys, hunting for exactly that signature.

They found seven candidates.