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

Every Snowflake Needs a Speck of Dust and So Do Planets

August 11, 2026

A snowflake cannot form out of nothing. Water vapour will sit in the air quite happily, supercooled and reluctant, until it finds a speck of dust to build on and then it crystallises around it. Cosmochemists have had a version of that problem for decades. The early Solar System was a furnace of gas, and the first solid grains had to condense out of it somehow, yet condensing from a perfectly uniform gas is slow and difficult work. New research from Caltech, analysing fragments of a meteorite that fell over Mexico in 1969, suggests the seeds were already there. Buried inside the oldest solids we possess are specks of stardust from a star that lived and died before the Sun existed.
The Dark Matter Detector in the Scottish Borders

August 11, 2026

Hunting for dark matter usually means building something enormous and burying it — a tank of liquid xenon in a mine, a magnet the size of a lorry, decades of engineering and a great deal of money. A team in Japan have just done it differently. They realised that the Earth's own magnetic field is larger than any magnet we could ever construct, and that the gap between the ground and the ionosphere behaves as a natural resonating cavity, ringing at around eight cycles per second. If dark matter is what some theorists suspect, it should leave a faint hum in that cavity. So they went looking, not with a new instrument, but in ten years of geomagnetic readings already recorded at a quiet observatory in Dumfriesshire in Scotland.
What If There's a Star Inside a Black Hole?

August 11, 2026

Ask what lies inside a black hole and the honest answer has always been a bit of a shrug and something about a singularity, a point where density becomes infinite and physics stops being able to tell you anything at all. It is the most unsatisfying answer in astrophysics, second only perhaps to what happened before the Big Bang. Now two theorists in China have produced a solution in which something else sits inside the horizon entirely, a neutron star, whole and intact, twelve kilometres across, its interior perfectly well behaved and apparently defying the laws of physics.
Seven Needles, 800,000 Haystacks

August 10, 2026

A quasar is a supermassive black hole in the act of feeding, and it’s so bright that it drowns out the galaxy it sits in. That is a nuisance if you want to weigh the galaxy and weighing it is exactly what you need to do to understand how black holes and the host galaxies grew up together. There is a way round it however, catch a quasar whose galaxy happens to be bending the light of something further away, and the bending betrays the mass. The catch is that such alignments are vanishingly rare, and the survey that might contain them holds 800,000 quasars. A team at Ohio State set a neural network on the pile and it came back with seven.
The Odds of Finding Water on Mars

August 10, 2026

Mars has plenty of water, and almost all of it is in the wrong place. The poles are rich in ice, the equator, where you would actually want to land, has none within reach. That leaves the mid-latitudes, and until now the honest answer about what lies beneath them has been a bit of a shrug. Two new studies from the Planetary Science Institute have changed the shape of that answer. Rather than simply asking whether the data are consistent with buried ice, they have started calculating the odds and can now say, of a given patch of Martian ground, that there is a 64 per cent chance of finding ice if you dig there.
The Telescope That Points Itself

August 10, 2026

Time on a large professional telescope is one of the scarcest resources in science. Astronomers wait months for a few hours, and every one of those hours is a running argument with the weather, the Moon and the atmosphere. Point at the wrong target at the wrong moment and the data comes back soft, washed out, or useless, with the next chance half a year away. A team has now handed that argument to a machine. Their system was trained not on the rules astronomers use but on what astronomers actually did, night after night, for years.
The Asteroid That May Be Three Worlds

August 01, 2026

We have been watching asteroid (44) Nysa for well over a century without ever really knowing what it looks like. Now the sharpest images ever taken of it, from two of the largest telescopes on Earth, have revealed two deep valleys running right around its circumference and the team behind them think those are necks, joining three separate lobes into a single 75 kilometre body. If that holds up, Nysa is the first three lobed world we have ever found. And in the glare beside it the same observations turned up something nobody was looking for, a tiny moon a kilometre across, which may be the thing that settles the argument.
The Star That Exploded Without Hydrogen

July 31, 2026

Twenty five years ago a star in the constellation Puppis blew itself apart and then vanished behind a curtain of its own soot. Astronomers knew only that the explosion contained no hydrogen at all, which for the most abundant element in the universe is a very strange absence. Now the dust has finally thinned, and the culprits have stepped into view, a white dwarf quietly stripping a rare helium star of its substance. But the emerging picture came with something nobody expected, clumps of gas tearing outwards at twenty million miles an hour, of a kind never seen in any other nova. Nobody yet knows what fired them.
What happens to a moon when its planet is stolen?

July 31, 2026

The galaxy is littered with rogue planets, worlds flung out of the systems that built them, drifting between the stars with no sun to call their own. But when a planet is torn away, does anything go with it? New simulations say yes, a passing star can rip a world out of its orbit and leave its moons still faithfully circling it, sailing off into the dark as a set. If our own Jupiter were evicted tomorrow, all four Galilean moons would go with it. And in that darkness, with no sunlight at all, one of those moons might still be warm enough for an ocean.
The Exciting Plan to Photograph an Alien Continent

July 30, 2026

NASA has selected a concept study, led by physicist Paul Stankus, exploring whether a pair of spacecraft flying in tight formation could one day produce an actual image of an Earth like exoplanet's surface, oceans, continents and all. It's an early stage idea, backed by NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program, but if it ever came together, it would represent an extraordinary leap beyond simply detecting a distant world to genuinely seeing its face.
A Thermal Camera Trick Could Let LIGO See Twice as Far

July 30, 2026

A team of researchers have found a surprisingly simple way to boost the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors like LIGO. It’s surprisingly simple to, just point an ordinary thermal imaging camera at the mirrors themselves. The technique could improve LIGO's next upgrade by up to 31%, letting it detect neutron star collisions tens of millions of light years farther away, and is already being built into the design of its planned successor, Cosmic Explorer.
Mars' Double Storm Problem

July 30, 2026

A new study presented at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting suggests that solar storms may warm the Martian lower atmosphere, but only when they strike during a major Martian dust storm. The discovery was accidental, emerging from a search for a different effect entirely, and hints that the weather system on Mars may be more tangled and interconnected than scientists previously assumed.
The Milky Way's Most Powerful Particle Accelerator

July 22, 2026

Astronomers have conclusively identified a source of the highest energy cosmic ray protons in the Milky Way, solving a long standing puzzle near the star Altair. By combining gamma ray, radio, and X-ray data from three separate observatories, a Hiroshima University led team ruled out competing explanations and confirmed the object as a genuine “PeVatron”. These natural particle accelerators are far more powerful than anything humans have ever built and helps us in the hunt for similar sources across the Galaxy.
The Case of the Sun's Missing Silver

July 20, 2026

Astronomers have solved a decades old puzzle about the Sun's missing silver, not by finding something new, but by modelling something old far more accurately. A revised, more realistic model of the Sun's atmosphere reveals it actually contains 55 per cent more silver than previously calculated, finally matching what meteorites have been telling us all along. It's a quiet reminder that some of the biggest revelations in astronomy come not from new data, but from asking familiar questions with sharper tools.
The First Breath of Another World

July 20, 2026

Astronomers have detected an atmosphere around a rocky planet in another star's habitable zone for the very first time. It’s a milestone that brings us a step closer to answering whether life could exist beyond our Solar System. Predicted by a mathematical model before it was ever observed, and confirmed using a rare planetary alignment 48 light years away, this discovery does more than identify one intriguing world, it provides us with a whole new way to search for others like it.
After a Billion Kilometres, China's Asteroid Hunter Finally Arrives

July 15, 2026

After chasing a small asteroid across a billion kilometres of space, China's Tianwen-2 probe has finally caught up, closing to within twenty kilometres of its target and beginning detailed scientific study. What it uncovers next could help settle a genuinely intriguing question, whether this quiet companion of Earth is simply another asteroid, or a long lost piece of the Moon itself.
The Oldest Stars in the Galaxy Just Weighed In on One of Cosmology's Biggest Arguments

July 14, 2026

Astronomers have measured the ages of over a hundred and fifty thousand ancient stars scattered across our Galaxy, and found the oldest of them is just the age it should be if the standard picture of the universe is correct. That simple agreement quietly undermines one of the leading attempts to explain a stubborn mystery, and hints that the real answer to the Hubble tension may lie somewhere else entirely.
Rebooting a Spacecraft, 140 Million Kilometres From Home.

July 13, 2026

Engineers have just upgraded the software running a spacecraft 140 million kilometres away, then held their breath through two full reboots with an eight minute delay on every command. The prize for getting it right is a close up look at an asteroid humanity has already changed forever, and the answer to a question nobody has been able to answer since 2022, what did we actually do to it?
Watching Dawn and Dusk on a Distant Hot Jupiter

July 13, 2026

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have caught an extreme, tidally locked exoplanet in the act of showing two very different faces at once, a fierce, wind battered hemisphere and a comparatively gentler half. The discovery not only reveals a planet with a genuine weather system violent enough to tear water apart, it hints at a missing ingredient in how scientists model alien atmospheres altogether.
Listening for the Universe's Faintest Whispers, a Billion Supernovae at Once

July 13, 2026

Buried a kilometre underground in Japan, one of the world's most sensitive detectors may have caught its first faint trace of a sound scientists have been straining to hear for decades, the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the universe. It is not yet a confirmed discovery, but if it holds up, it could rewrite how we trace the life and death of stars.