Elizabeth Landau

4 days ago | nelsonpub.com | Elizabeth Landau

By Elizabeth Landau, Senior Communications Specialist, NASASince the big bang, the early universe had hydrogen, helium, and a scant amount of lithium. Later, some heavier elements, including iron, were forged in stars. But one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics is: How did the first elements heavier than iron, such as gold, get created and distributed throughout the universe?

2 weeks ago | yahoo.com | Elizabeth Landau

During Panama’s wet season, forests boom with a chorus of túngara frog mating calls as males compete for females’ attention.But these calls put the frogs in a precarious position between sex and death. For a fringe-lipped bat, it’s as though its meal is ringing a dinner bell. Bats navigate the world with echolocation, listening to the sound waves of their own calls bouncing off nearby objects. Their hearing is so precise they can even home in on prey using ripples that frog calls make on water.

2 weeks ago | science.nasa.gov | Elizabeth Landau

Since the big bang, the early universe had hydrogen, helium, and a scant amount of lithium. Later, some heavier elements, including iron, were forged in stars. But one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics is: How did the first elements heavier than iron, such as gold, get created and distributed throughout the universe? “It’s a pretty fundamental question in terms of the origin of complex matter in the universe,” said Anirudh Patel, a doctoral student at Columbia University in New York.

3 weeks ago | science.nasa.gov | Elizabeth Landau

Members of NASA’s recently launched SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) mission team participated in the New York Stock Exchange’s closing bell ceremony in New York City on April 22. Michael Thelen, SPHEREx flight system manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, is seen here ringing the closing bell.

1 month ago | smithsonianmag.com | Elizabeth Landau

Astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin spent nearly a year in “utter bewilderment” after arriving at the Harvard College Observatory in the early 1920s. She often worked into the late evening and felt “in a state of exhaustion and despair,” she later wrote in her autobiography. The fruits of her labor would earn her an important place in the history of astronomy. A century ago this year, her 1925 doctoral thesis presented a controversial idea: that hydrogen and helium dominate stars.