Long may science continue to inspire poetry
23/05/2013 14:53
- 23 May 2013
- Magazine issue 2918.
"KEPLER was my North, my South, my East and West… I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong." So lamented astronomer Geoff Marcy on discovering that the space telescope might have spotted its last exoplanet. Marcy's impassioned pastiche of W. H. Auden's Funeral Blues was much remarked on after NASA's announcement of Kepler's abrupt demise. It is unusual, after all, for a piece of orbital machinery to be commemorated in verse – even a telescope whose legacy promises huge advances in answering one of the most important questions of our time (see "Drake equation for alien life gets an upgrade"). [Read more] ...