Reading Time: 2 minutes I was first introduced to astronomy research through the study of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), when I attended the Yale Summer Program in Astrophysics as a high schooler. I liked to think of it as a kind of astrophysical babysitting project: we kept an eye on our assigned baby asteroid every night, watched its movements, and, […]
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NASA’s Artemis: It’s time to walk on the Moon again
Reading Time: 3 minutes Fifty years after the end of the Apollo program, humanity is once again heading for the Moon. In July, Congress passed the CHIPS Act, a law to incentivize the manufacture of computer chips in the United States. Tucked into that mega-bill was an official authorization for NASA’s next-generation Moon program, which the agency calls Artemis. […]
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‘Chaos’: JWST spots mangled, post-collision galaxy
Reading Time: < 1 minute The Cartwheel Galaxy is not having a good eon. A new infrared image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the aptly-named galaxy distorted by a “high-speed collision” with another, smaller galaxy in the Sculptor constellation, 500 million light-years away. The resulting distention of the structure of the Cartwheel galaxy has been characterized by NASA […]
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The saved and the damned of Proxima Centauri B
Reading Time: 14 minutes As a child, I delighted in books of the unexplained—ghosts and UFOs, Mary Celestes and Bermuda Triangles, abominable snowmen and cursed mummies. As a grown-up skeptic, many of these inexplicable phenomena have long been explained, or competently assigned diminishing probabilities. Ghosts almost certainly don’t hang around graveyards. Yetis? Nope. The Loch Ness Monster? Get over […]
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An astonishing new tool reopens the question of human significance
Reading Time: 5 minutes In a joint effort by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched on December 25, 2021 to a distance a million miles from Earth. It is the most powerful telescope to date and will use infrared resolution to see objects no other device has […]
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Key hurdle cleared in our return to the moon
Reading Time: < 1 minute Artemis, a NASA program intended to return humans to the moon for the first time since 1972, recently took a significant step forward with the successful completion of tests on the Orion Launch Abort System motor in the desert near Promontory, Utah. Sitting atop the Orion spacecraft, the abort motor is designed to increase astronaut […]
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Can we still make peace in space?
Reading Time: 6 minutes What a year for symbols of peace and progress. On Thursday, April 7, the UN General Assembly removed Russia from the Human Rights Council on which it had sat for weeks while displacing 10 million Ukrainians, internally and abroad. In the inadequacy of an international organization formed after World War II to sustain peace among […]