Scott Alan Johnston
Perseverance Finds an Ancient, Fast Flowing River
In a first for Martian water science, NASA’s Perseverance rover has discovered geological evidence of a large, fast-moving river in…
China Finally Tells us What's Going on With its Mars Rover
The Zhurong Rover has sat unmoving and unresponsive on Mars since May 20th, 2022, when one of the planet’s infamous…
The Milky Way has Trapped the Large Magellanic Cloud With its Gravity. What Comes Next?
Our galaxy’s largest nearby companion is the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a dwarf galaxy visible to the naked eye in…
Hubble Sees Two Quasars Side by Side in the Early Universe
When it comes to the brightest, most powerful objects in the Universe, not much can beat a Quasar. A Gamma…
A Stellar Explosion Mimicked the End of the Death Star
In 1997, George Lucas released the special edition remaster of his Star Wars trilogy, making changes to the special effects…
Asteroid Ryugu Contains Niacin (aka Vitamin B3)
In December 2020, JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft delivered a pristine sample of otherworldly dust and rock from asteroid Ryugu to Earth.…
Didymos is Spinning So Quickly That Rocks are Detaching at its Equator and Going Into Orbit
Asteroid Didymos is spitting rocks out into space. Last fall, when NASA’s DART mission impacted Didymos’ moon Dimorphos in a…
Christiaan Huygens’ Telescope Lenses Tell Us He Was Nearsighted
A world-famous 17th-century astronomer credited with discovering Saturn’s moon Titan may have needed glasses, according to a recent paper in…
It's Time for Mysterious Spokes to Appear in Saturn's Rings
The Hubble Space Telescope recently captured the appearance of several asymmetrical ‘spokes’ rising above the rings of Saturn, marking a…
Curiosity Just Found its Strongest Evidence of Ancient Water and Waves on Mars
This week, NASA’s Curiosity rover stumbled across the best evidence yet that liquid water once covered much of Mars in…