Dr. Pamela is big on volcanoes, and she hoped we’d have an awesome new eruption to report, but we don't. There is, however, still a lot of news this week that doesn’t include an Iceland eruption. Instead, the news includes the first images from a new spacecraft, updates on Lucy’s discovery of a contact binary, and more on the OSIRIS-REx sample return.
Credit: NASA While asteroids are proving themselves more complicated than we expected, Mars, in a fit of publications, is also demanding attention for all its icy complexity. Back in May 2022, the Insight lander recorded a Marsquake with a magnitude of 4.7. While not...
Credit: NASA Back in October 2021, a mission called Lucy lifted off on a multi-year journey to visit Jupiter’s two collections of Trojan Asteroids. Today, it is making its way through the asteroid belt before circling back to use the Earth to get a gravitational...
Credit: Josh Borrow, the FLAMINGO team and the Virgo Consortium To succeed in astronomy, you really need to either be really really good with technology, or really really good at math. I personally am a technology person, and I’ll happily operate telescopes and write...
Credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. Once upon a time, we thought asteroids were just bland rocks. Turns out, if you actually look at them from up close, they are complex and interesting. When the Dawn mission visited the largest...
Image Credit: APS/Alan Stonebraker Pairs of objects are responsible for some of the coolest phenomena in our universe, and while a lot of these pairs end up merging into a single object given enough time, there are a few… theoretically at least… that the universe...
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, A. Levan (IMAPP, Warw), A. Pagan (STScI) One of the awesome things about growing older as an astronomer is you get to see the weird stuff no one understood in your youth become the everyday normal of your middle age. While we still...
Bluewalker 3 over Kitt Peak In this week’s closer look, we go where I haven’t really wanted to go before: we are going to look at the impacts of the growing number of satellites, like star links, on our ability to safely live and do astronomy. This closer look is...
Credit: X-ray: NASA/SAO/GSFC/M. Corcoran et al.; Image Processing: L. Frattare, J. Major, N. Wolk (SAO/CXC) Astronomers kind of live to see weird weird objects. While likely always visible to humans, this southern hemisphere star transformed from kind of meh to the...
Credit: Science Communication Lab for DESY Ultimately, our universe is far more diverse in its reality than humans tend to be in our theorizing. Over and over, we have found remarkable things just by turning a new instrument skyward. From the discovery of cold...
Credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Garlick/M. Zamani To me it feels like our biggest unknowns are often part of the high-energy universe - those processes and objects rise to the highest temperatures and give off the bluest of light. As an example, back in 2018, researchers...
