Controversial to the very end, Tom van Flandern died age 62 from late-diagnosed colon cancer on the 9th of January.

A very persistent thorn in the side of mainstream astronomy, cosmogony and cosmology, he's infamous for claiming asteroids and comets come from exploded planets, that gravity propagates at billions of times lightspeed, and that the Face on Mars is one sign of intelligence amongst many on the Red Planet.

I disagreed with just about everything he said, but in learning just why I disagreed I learnt a lot. No doubt he's gathered a cloud of kooks who believe everything he wrote, but maybe some of them might think outside the box enough to make a real breakthrough - and that's not a bad thing.