Carolyn Collins Petersen
Astronomers Find a Rare “Einstein Cross”
Gravitational lensing is one of astronomy's great wonders: a natural lens that magnifies the distant universe. Sometimes a lensing system…
A New Technique Lets Us Learn What the Milky Way’s Arms Are Made Of
We're all used to seeing maps of the Milky Way rich with stars and nebulae. But, there are regions we…
An Enormous Cosmological Simulation Wraps Up, Recreating Even More of the Universe
There's an old joke among astronomy students about a question on the final exam for a cosmology class. It goes…
Record-Breaking Magnetar was There in the Data All Along
The cosmic zoo has strange beasts that astronomers stumble across in the most fascinating ways. Not long ago a team…
Carbon-Based Molecules Seen Just a Billion Years After the Big Bang
The more astronomers look at the early Universe, the more discoveries they make. Some of those finds change what they…
Soar Past Thousands of Galaxies in the Early Universe in Thrilling 3D
Want to visit the most distant galaxy in the early Universe? Now you can via a fantastic visualization created from…
Want to Find Colliding Black Holes? Check the Disks Around Quasars
The universe is awash in gravitational waves. The collisions of massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars generate…
Ancient Stars Somehow Survived Close to the Center of the Milky Way
The core of our Milky Way Galaxy draws astronomers' attention like moths to a flame. That's because there's a lot…
JWST Sees the Most Distant Active Supermassive Black Hole
As astronomers push our views of the Universe further back in time, their telescopes keep uncovering surprises. That's the case…
JWST Sees the Beginning of the Cosmic Web
The Cosmic Web is the large-scale structure of the Universe. If you could watch our cosmos unfold from the Big…