Carolyn Collins Petersen
More Than Half of Near Earth Objects Could Be “Dark Comets”
Next time you're visiting the seaside or a large lake, or even sipping a frosty glass of water, think about…
Webb Completes Its Second Year of Operations
What happens when a spiral and an elliptical galaxy collide? To celebrate the second anniversary of the "first light" for…
Ancient People Saw a Kilonova Light up the Sky
What happens when aging white dwarf stars come together? Observers in feudal Japan in the year 1181 had a front-row…
Webb Looks at One of the Best Gravitationally Lensed Quasars Ever Discovered
It looks like a distant ring with three sparkly jewels, but the Webb telescope's (JWST) most recent image is really…
More Evidence that the Kuiper Belt is Bigger Than We Thought
As the New Horizons spacecraft continues its epic journey to explore the Kuiper Belt, it has a study partner back…
Mysterious Swirls on the Moon Could Be Explained by Underground Magma
In the latest chapter of "The Mystery of the Lunar Swirls," planetary scientists have a new theory to explain these…
Galaxies Filled With Old Stars Seen Shortly After the Big Bang
How can young galaxies in the early Universe have ancient stars? That's the question a team of astronomers set out…
Earliest Supermassive Black Holes Were “Shockingly Normal”
The early Universe is a puzzling and—in many ways—still-unknown place. The first billion years of cosmic history saw the explosive…
Seeing Both Sides of the Sun at the Same Time
As everybody who saw May's spectacular auroral displays knows, the Sun is in its most active period in 11 years.…
Cepheid Variables are the Bedrock of the Cosmic Distance Ladder. Astronomers are Trying to Understand them Better
One of the most fundamental questions astronomers ask about an object is "What's its distance?" For very faraway objects, they…