Carolyn Collins Petersen
The Tonga Eruption Was So Powerful it Disrupted Satellites Half a World Away
Remember the huge Tonga eruption in the South Pacific in January 2022? This underwater volcano sent tons of ash into…
Astronomers Watched a Fast Radio Burst Go Right Through a Star’s Atmosphere
The universe is filled with things that go flash in the night. That includes fast radio bursts (FRBs). These are…
Seismic Waves Help Map the Core of Mars for the First Time
More than a hundred years after geologists first observed how seismic waves traveled through Earth, they've achieved another seismic first.…
Newborn Star Surrounded By Planet-Forming Disks at Different Angles
One of the great questions about our solar system is: what was it like as it formed? We know that…
Dark Energy Was Always Present, Everywhere and at Every Time
The Force is with us, according to cosmologists working to understand a mysterious "something" that's making the universe expand. Its…
Astronomers are Starting to Find the Wreckage Left Over from the First Stars in the Universe
The first stars were odd ducks. Nobody's observed them yet (although astronomers are hopeful JWST might spot them someday) but…
ESA Can’t Deploy JUICE’s Radar Antenna. It Needs It to Scan Under the Ice at Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede
In a scene eerily reminiscent of the Galileo spacecraft's antenna issues, ESA's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) is having a…
We Can Now See Into the Permanently Shadowed Craters on the Moon
An instrument called ShadowCam is giving NASA's planned Artemis missions to the Moon some advanced views of a landing site.…
Be Grateful the Sun Can’t Produce Flares Like This
Okay, so we all know that the Sun is heading into solar maximum. That means it's quite a bit more…
A Black Hole Tore a Star to Pieces. The Closest We’ve Ever Seen.
We all know that black holes are destructive monsters. Their tremendous gravitational pull sucks in anything that gets in the…