Mark Thompson

Science broadcaster and author. Mark is known for his tireless enthusiasm for making science accessible, through numerous tv, radio, podcast and theatre appearances, and books. He was a part of the award-nominated BBC Stargazing LIVE TV Show in the UK and his Spectacular Science theatre show has received 5 star reviews across UK theatres. In 2025 he is launching his new podcast Cosmic Commerce and is working on a new book 101 Facts You Didn't Know About Deep Space In 2018, Mark received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of East Anglia.

You can email Mark here

Recent Articles

The Shape of a Black Hole

June 11, 2026

Black holes are already strange, regions of space where gravity is so extreme that not even light can escape. But physicists have long known there's another layer of weirdness, that black holes also behave like thermodynamic objects, with temperature, entropy, and phase transitions just like a gas or a liquid. Now, a new approach borrowed from pure mathematics is revealing hidden patterns in that behaviour and hinting at something fundamental about the nature of black holes themselves.
Written in Rock

June 11, 2026

A small rock found in the African desert has just handed scientists an extraordinary window into one of the most violent and consequential periods in the history of the Solar System. Inside this lunar meteorite, a chunk of the Moon knocked to Earth by an ancient collision, researchers have found evidence of a massive impact event 3.5 billion years ago, one that matches the timing of known impacts on Earth and in the asteroid belt. Three worlds but one shared bombardment and a story that may have everything to do with the origins of life.
Titan's Hidden Blanket

June 11, 2026

Saturn's moon Titan has long fascinated scientists, it’s a world with rivers, lakes, and a thick atmosphere, all made not of water but of methane. Now, a new study suggests Titan is stranger than first imagined since beneath its surface lies a 9 km thick crust of methane laced ice that acts like a giant thermal blanket, warming the interior in ways nobody expected.
Where Not to Look in the Search for ET

June 10, 2026

When we scan the skies for signs of alien civilisations, where exactly should we be looking and perhaps more importantly, where should we not? A high school student from Ankara has just published a remarkably sophisticated answer to that question, building a filtering system that sifts nearly 1.75 million stars and identifies which ones are genuinely worth our attention. The result is a publicly available catalogue that could transform how the search for extraterrestrial intelligence allocates its most precious resource - time.
Reading the Moon in X-rays

June 10, 2026

We've walked on the Moon, driven rovers across its surface, and analysed every gram of rock the Apollo astronauts brought home, yet we still don't have a complete picture of what the Moon is actually made of. Now a team of researchers in Japan think they've found the answer, a compact X-ray telescope, small enough to sit on a single satellite, that could map the entire lunar surface in just two years. It's an elegant solution to one of planetary science's most stubborn problems and the implications for understanding where the Moon came from could be revolutionary.
Blue Origin's Lunar Lander Just Passed Its Toughest Test Yet

May 31, 2026

Before any spacecraft can survive the Moon, it has to survive something almost as brutal, a giant metal chamber in Houston that strips away every molecule of air and swings temperatures from scorching to freezing in minutes. Blue Origin's lunar lander just spent time in exactly that chamber and it came out the other side ready for the real thing.
The Loudest Planet Wins

May 31, 2026

We are closer than ever to detecting signs of life on another world. The James Webb Space Telescope is already ‘sniffing’ alien atmospheres, and the Habitable Worlds Observatory is being built specifically to find biology beyond Earth. But a new paper raises an uncomfortable question; when we do find that first biosignature, will it actually tell us anything meaningful about life in the universe? The answer, it turns out, might be no.
The Galaxy That Forgot to Spin

May 31, 2026

Every galaxy we know of spins. It's one of those rules of the universe so fundamental that astronomers barely think about it anymore. So when the James Webb Space Telescope pointed at one of the most massive galaxies in the early universe and found…well nothing. No spin, just stillness. They had to look twice.
Did We Invent Dark Energy for Nothing?

May 31, 2026

For nearly thirty years, dark energy has been cosmology's great get out of jail free card, the invisible, mysterious force we invented to explain why the universe is expanding faster than it should be. Now a team of mathematicians says we may never have needed it at all. And the implications are stranger than you might think.
Who You Send to the Moon Matters More Than You Think

May 30, 2026

Building a permanent base on the Moon sounds like an engineering problem. Design the habitat, sort the power supply, figure out life support, and you're most of the way there. But the engineers who've spent time thinking hard about this will tell you the real challenge isn't the hardware — it's the humans inside it. Now researchers have built a virtual Moon base and run tens of thousands of simulated missions inside it, studying not the rocket engines or the radiation shielding, but the astronauts themselves. What they found could reshape how we plan humanity's return to the lunar surface.
The Sun is Changing and We Don’t Know Why

May 29, 2026

The Sun has a heartbeat. Every eleven years it swells with magnetic fury, hurling solar flares and charged particles into space, sparking auroral displays and threatening power grids, all before quietening down again. We've tracked this rhythm for centuries. But now, scientists listening to sound waves deep inside our local star have found something deeply unexpected, that heartbeat is changing. And nobody yet knows what it means.
20,000 Eyes on the Universe

May 29, 2026

We live in a golden age of astronomical imaging. Telescopes are capturing billions of galaxy images, painting the universe in breathtaking detail. But there's a problem, and it's a big one. A photograph tells you what something looks like but it doesn't tell you what it's made of, how fast it's moving, or how far away it really is. For that, you need spectroscopy. And right now, astronomy has a catastrophic imbalance, billions of images and nowhere near enough spectra to match them. A new telescope currently under construction in the mountains of western China is about to change that quite dramatically.
The Flash Memory That Space Can't Destroy

May 29, 2026

Every byte of data a spacecraft collects, every image, every reading, every scientific measurement has to survive one of the most hostile environments imaginable. Space is awash with radiation, and that radiation is the silent enemy of conventional data storage. Now, a team of researchers have built a new kind of memory chip that doesn't just tolerate radiation, it laughs in its face. Using a quirk of physics called ferroelectricity, this technology can withstand radiation levels equivalent to 100 million X-rays, and it could transform how we store data on missions heading deeper into the Solar System than we've ever ventured before.
We Can Now Weigh Galaxies Using Dead Stars As Scales

May 29, 2026

Researchers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville have found a new way to measure the mass of neighbouring galaxies using pulsars. Using the universe's most precise natural clocks it’s possible to detect tiny gravitational disturbances rippling through the Milky Way. By analysing 54 millisecond pulsars, the team directly measured the gravitational pull of both the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy, including their dark matter. The same technique could eventually map dark matter across the entire Galaxy bringing us closer to understanding what it actually is.
Something Just Passed Between Us and a Distant Star.

May 27, 2026

In December 2019, astronomers detected a one hour brightening of a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a classic gravitational microlensing event. These occur when a compact object bends a distant the light of a distant star as it passes in front of it. The object responsible in this instance, named Phoebe, has a mass of roughly three times that of our Moon making it far too small to be a stellar black hole, but consistent with a primordial black hole formed moments after the Big Bang.
When Spacetime Crystallises, a Black Hole is Born

May 27, 2026

Physicists have thought for decades that microscopic black holes can theoretically emerge not from exploding stars but from delicate "critical states" in which space and time organise themselves into a crystal like structure. Now, for the first time, researchers from TU Wien and Goethe University Frankfurt have derived an exact mathematical formula describing this bizarre phenomenon using a surprising trick involving infinitely many dimensions!
When the Sun Tries to Explode and Fails

May 26, 2026

Scientists have captured one of the most detailed observations ever of a failed solar eruption, a powerful blast from the Sun that built into what should have been a billion tonne plasma ejection, then stalled and collapsed back to the surface. Using data from five spacecraft simultaneously, the team identified a double magnetic process that strangled the eruption from both above and below.
The Sun Just Did Something Nobody Expected and it Kept Going For 19 Days

May 26, 2026

In August 2025, a NASA spacecraft detected a solar radio burst that refused to stop lasting 19 days, nearly four times longer than any previously recorded. A team of researchers used data from four spacecraft spread across the inner Solar System to track the event and pinpoint its source to a magnetic structure called a helmet streamer, likely supercharged by a series of powerful solar eruptions.
Three Stars, One Extraordinary System and a Drama Still to Come

May 26, 2026

Astronomers have discovered a remarkable triple star system in which two Sun like stars orbit each other every 4.75 days, while a giant star, ten times the size of our Sun circles the pair every 412 days. All three orbit in almost exactly the same plane, and because we view that plane edge on from Earth, the stars eclipse each other in a distinctive pattern that allows all three to be measured simultaneously. The giant is slowly swelling and will eventually overflow its gravitational boundary, triggering a dramatic mass transfer event that could reshape or even destroy the system.
Dark Matter May Have Left Its Fingerprint in a Gravitational Wave.

May 15, 2026

Dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. We have never directly detected a single particle of it. But a new method developed by physicists at MIT and across Europe may have just opened a door we didn't know existed. When two black holes collide and merge, they send ripples through the fabric of spacetime, these are known as gravitational waves and if those black holes happened to spiral through a dense cloud of dark matter on their way in, those waves carry an imprint of it. For the first time, scientists have a technique to read that imprint and one signal in the existing data is already raising eyebrows.