Lisa Grossman

Boston

Astronomy Reporter at Science News

Astronomy reporter at Science News. Lifelong astronomy nerd. Queer Jewish mom. Ideas my own. She/her/hers

Featured in: Favicon

sciencenews.org Favicon

businessinsider.com Favicon

wired.com

newscientist.com Favicon

bizjournals.com Favicon

patch.com

substack.com Favicon

newsbreak.com Favicon

realclearscience.com Favicon

snexplores.org + 9 more

Articles

A Soviet spacecraft will crash to Earth this month

1 week ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman

A Soviet space probe stuck in orbit since a failed 1972 launch is expected to crash to Earth this month. The spacecraft, dubbed Kosmos 482, is predicted to reenter Earth’s atmosphere on May 12, according to a spokesperson for the U.S. Space Force. A different calculation by satellite analyst Marco Langbroek at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands predicts reentry on May 10. The exact landing site won’t be known until shortly before impact.
A claimed hint of alien life whips up spirited debate

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman

You may have already seen the headlines: Signs of life have reportedly been discovered on an alien world. A team of astronomers led by Nikku Madhusudhan of the University of Cambridge used the James Webb Space Telescope to search for interesting molecules in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system called K2 18b. The team now says they’ve found molecules that, on Earth, are associated with life, in an abundance that is hard to explain otherwise.
A NASA rover finally found Mars’ missing carbon

3 weeks ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman

The carbon that once warmed Mars’ atmosphere has been locked in its rusty rocks for millennia. That’s the story revealed by a hidden cache of carbon-bearing minerals unearthed by NASA’s Curiosity rover along its route up a Martian mountain. The finding is the first evidence of a carbon cycle on the Red Planet, but also suggests that Mars lost its life-friendly climate because that carbon cycle was slow, researchers report in the April 18 Science.
Check out some of the weird rocks that have turned up on Mars

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman

As the Mars rover Perseverance crested the top of Witch Hazel Hill, its operators back on Earth expected amazing things. This area on the western rim of the Jezero crater, along an ancient river delta that Perseverance has been exploring since it landed in 2021, is thought to contain some of the oldest rocks on the planet’s surface. The light-toned, layered materials promise a record of a wetter time, possibly one that hosted life.
An ionosphere map from smartphone data may help improve GPS

1 month ago | snexplores.org | Carolyn Wilke |Stephen Ornes |Lisa Grossman |Sarah Zielinski

Smartphones are helping chart an erratic region of Earth’s atmosphere that can mess with navigation systems and other tech. That region is the ionosphere — a sea of charged particles on the edge of outer space. There, the sun’s radiation cooks gases in the air. This rips electrons off neutral atoms and molecules, creating free-roaming charged particles. Levels of these charged particles shift with changing sunlight and solar activity.
JWST spots the earliest sign yet of a distant galaxy reshaping its cosmic environs

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman

The James Webb Space Telescope has caught a distant galaxy blowing an unexpected bubble in the gas around it, just 330 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy, dubbed JADES-GS-z13-1, marks the earliest sign yet spotted of the era of cosmic reionization, a transformative period in the universe’s history when the first stars and galaxies began to reshape their environment, astronomers report in the March 27 Nature.
The nearest single star to Earth has four small planets

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman

The nearest single star to the sun, Barnard’s star, has a brood of planets all its own. The red dwarf star, about six light-years from Earth, hosts four close-in planets each about two to three times the mass of Mars, astronomers report in the March 20 Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Barnard’s star has a long history of claimed detections, but none of them could be confirmed for a long time,” says astronomer Ritvik Basant of the University of Chicago.
New baby pictures of the universe deepen a cosmic mystery

1 month ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman

The clearest pictures yet of the newborn cosmos strengthen the prevailing model of the universe but deepen a mystery about its expansion rate. Measurements of this rate, known as the Hubble constant, have produced conflicting results. Cosmologists hoped that new data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile, which examines the oldest light in the universe, would clear things up and possibly reveal physics that diverges from the standard model of cosmology.
The Blue Ghost lander just witnessed a lunar eclipse - from the moon

2 months ago | sciencenews.org | Lisa Grossman |Christopher Crockett

The privately-owned Blue Ghost moon lander, built by Texas-based company Firefly Aerospace, has captured a rare view of a lunar eclipse from the moon’s surface. The lander, which touched down March 2 in a volcanic plain on the moon’s nearside, has spent its time deploying instruments and collecting data. On the night of March 13, as Earth’s shadow covered the moon in a total lunar eclipse, Blue Ghost turned its cameras back toward Earth.
Pluto and its moon Charon may have paired up with a kiss

2 months ago | snexplores.org | Lisa Grossman

computer model: A program that runs on a computer that creates a model, or simulation, of a real-world feature, phenomenon or event. core: Something — usually round-shaped — in the center of an object. (in geology) Earth’s innermost layer. Or, a long, tube-like sample drilled down into ice, soil or rock. Cores allow scientists to examine layers of sediment, dissolved chemicals, rock and fossils to see how the environment at one location changed through hundreds to thousands of years or more.