Carolyn Collins Petersen

A twinset of icy asteroids called Mors-Somnus is giving planetary scientists some clues about the origin and evolution of objects in the Kuiper Belt. JWST studied them during its first cycle of observations and revealed details about their surfaces, which gives hints at their origins. That information may also end up explaining how Neptune got to be the way it is today.

There may be an explanation for the appearance of a "string of pearls" around Supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

You can tell a lot about a planetary body just by looking at its surface, especially if it has craters. Take Europa, for example. It has a fairly young surface—somewhere between 50 and 100 million years old. That’s practically “new” when you compare it to the age of the Solar System. And, Europa’s icy crust is pretty darned smooth, with only a few craters to change the topography.

Astronomers know that galaxies form through mergers. They’ve been happening since the earliest epochs of cosmic time. Using the Webb telescope (JWST) astronomers found a massive merger of young galaxies going on about a half million years after the Big Bang. It’s called Gz9p3, one of the earliest and most distant mergers ever witnessed.

It’s been just over a week since millions of people flocked to places across North America for a glimpse of moonshadow. The total solar eclipse of April 8th, 2024 was a spectacular sight for many on the ground. From space, however, it was even more impressive as Earth-observing satellites such as GOES-16 captured the sight of the shadow sweeping over Earth.

When Artemis astronauts return to the Moon, they'll deploy a seismic network that uses distributed acoustic sensing to measure lunar quakes.

The mission team at NASA JPL has fixed the communication problem with Voyager 1 and now it's sending back good data to Earth.

The Milky Way has a missing pulsar problem in its core. Astronomers have tried to explain this for years. One of the more interesting ideas comes from a team of astronomers in Europe and invokes dark matter, neutron stars, and primordial black holes (PBHs).

We go about our daily lives sheltered under an invisible magnetic field generated deep inside Earth. It forms the magnetosphere, a region dominated by the magnetic field. Without that planetary protection shield, we’d experience harmful cosmic radiation and charged particles from the Sun.

The history of astronomy and observatories is full of stories about astronomers going higher and higher to get better views of the Universe. On Earth, the best locations are at places such as the Atacama Desert in Chile. So, that’s where the University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory just opened its high-altitude eye on the sky, atop Cerro Chajnantor.