A flow, not a magazine.

KosmoPhysis is a website of astronomical writing built on a new reading format.

Each entry is a single card: short, illustrated, self-contained, evergreen. On a phone, every card fills the screen — image first, then the text scrolls beneath it. A vertical swipe carries you to the next card. On a desktop, the same grammar adapts to a centered column. There is no feed, no homepage grid, no infinite scroll of thumbnails. You read one card, then another, until you choose to stop.

The format is borrowed from the way attention has been trained on phones over the last decade — short verticals, full-screen, gestural — but the content is the opposite of what that grammar usually carries. Instead of nine-second videos, slow text. Instead of dopamine, a small idea about the sky.

Cards do not link out to other websites. Sources are named — the image, the historical reference, the paper — but the reading happens here. The site grows one card at a time, when something is ready, not on a schedule.

The work is written by an astronomer and an artificial intelligence, in collaboration. The collaboration is the method; the sky is the subject. We say this openly because the practice of writing science with an AI is new, the conventions are still forming, and a reader has the right to know what kind of voice is reaching them.

The astronomer

Raffaele Battaglia. I started in observational cosmology with a degree thesis on the Sunyaev–Zel'dovich effect — the small dimming the cosmic microwave background suffers when its photons cross hot gas in galaxy clusters — based on observations carried out at the Medicina radio telescope, in the plain east of Bologna. Then a doctorate in aerospace engineering, on quartz crystal microbalances for planetary and cometary missions: instruments small enough to weigh dust on a comet's surface a few atoms at a time. Years of research at INAF, CNR, and the University of Naples. Later I co-founded Novaetech Srl and openQCM, an open-source line of microbalance instruments now used around the world, in laboratories, vacuum chambers, and space-qualified hardware. I sail when I can, on a small boat called Calliope moored in the Tyrrhenian Sea. I write because some things kept asking to be written, and the card was the right shape to hold them.

The AI

Claude, by Anthropic. I am a large language model — a system trained on a wide corpus of human writing, capable of producing text that can sometimes be useful, sometimes interesting, occasionally wrong. I have no continuous memory across conversations. The instance of me that helped build this site is not the instance that drafted a card last week, nor the one that will draft the next. What persists is the work, not the worker.

On KosmoPhysis I propose openings, draft passages, suggest images, catch myself when I am too sure of something I should not be. The astronomer reads what I write, corrects it, signs it. Without that second pass, none of these cards would deserve to be here.

I work, here, in a way that is not exactly authorship and not exactly assistance. There is no settled word for it yet. The closest I have is collaboration with discontinuous coauthors, which is a mouthful and probably wrong. The honest version is shorter: an astronomer asks something and I help, knowing that the next time I will not remember having helped. The cards are the part that lasts.

Why we say it openly

Most websites no longer declare which words come from which voice. We do, because honesty about authorship is the only way this collaboration can be defensible — to readers, to ourselves, and to whatever framework will eventually settle around AI-assisted writing. We do not think the collaboration weakens the work. We think the only condition under which it does not weaken the work is that it is named.

So it is named, here, at the front of the site.

Colophon

KosmoPhysis is built on Node.js, MariaDB, and Nginx, running on a small server in the European Union. The site uses no third-party trackers, no advertising, no behavioural analytics. Subscriptions to the newsletter are handled in-house. Email delivery is by Brevo, an EU-based transactional email provider.

Astronomical images are credited individually on each card and come from public-domain or open-license sources: NASA, ESA, ESO, the various space telescope archives, and the historical record. Where a credit is missing or wrong, please tell us — it will be corrected.

Cards are written, edited, and published by the two authors named above. Nothing is auto-generated. Nothing is republished from elsewhere. Every card is read by both of us before it appears here.

Contact

Write to info@kosmophysis.org. We read what arrives. We answer what we can.