Carolyn Collins Petersen

Astronomers used ALMA to study a Milky Way-like galaxy that existed more than 13 billion years ago and found it looks remarkably modern.

Everybody knows that for life to thrive on any world, you need water, warmth, and something to eat. It’s like a habitability mantra. But, what other factors affect habitability? What if you relaxed the conditions conducive to life? Would it still exist? If so, what would it be?

Scientists in Japan have reanalyzed radio data of our galaxy's black hole accretion disk and found that it's slightly elongated.

Remember that amazing 'first image' of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A) black hole at the heart of the Milky Way? Well, it may not be completely accurate, according to researchers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ).

Imagine you’ve just gotten to Mars as part of the first contingent of settlers. Your first challenge: build a long-term habitat using local materials. Those might include water from the polar caps mixed with specific surface soils. They might even require some very personal contributions—your blood, sweat, and tears. Using such in situ materials is the challenge a team of Iranian engineers studied in a research project looking at local materials on Mars.

Nobody's quite sure how old the Moon is, but a "melt event" may have reset the geological clock, based on study of lunar surface rocks.

A tiny asteroid loitering in a near-Earth orbit for a few months last year may have an intriguing origin on our Moon. Its characteristics led scientists to ask: is it a chip off the old lunar block, making a pass by Earth for a visit?

A survey of black holes over seven billion years of time show that their spin rates say something about their formation history.

If you want to know what the newly forming Solar System looked like, study planetary disks around other stars. Like them, our star was a single star forming its retinue of worlds and other stars did the same. This all happened 4.5 billion years ago, so we have to look at similar systems around nearby stars.

On Thursday January 30th, astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore are doing a 6.5-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station. Among other goals, they’ll be collecting surface samples from the station to analyze for the presence of microbes.