Rafi Letzter
Rafi wrote for Live Science from 2017 until 2021, when he became a technical writer for IBM Quantum. He has a bachelor's degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of journalism. You can find his past science reporting at Inverse, Business Insider and Popular Science, and his past photojournalism on the Flash90 wire service and in the pages of The Courier Post of southern New Jersey.
Latest articles by Rafi Letzter

By Rafi Letzter Last updated
No one really knows what happens inside an atom.

By Rafi Letzter Last updated
The quarks inside atoms move slower than the quarks inside free-floating protons and neutrons. But why?

By Rafi Letzter Last updated
The new experiment demonstrated a bizarre quantum effect from the double-slit experiment at an unprecedented scale.

By Rafi Letzter Last updated
The Higgs boson appeared again at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and this time, it revealed something new and exciting about its behavior.

By Rafi Letzter Last updated
If the Higgs boson really is decaying into pairs of muons in the Large Hadron Collider, that's a big deal for particle physics.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Space junk is a growing problem. Better fight it with lasers.

By Rafi Letzter Published
The most remote particle detector on Earth has detected the most energetic antimatter neutrino ever, confirming a 51-year-old prediction.

By Rafi Letzter Published
At some point in the next few weeks, the U.S. plans to fire an extreme, hypersonic weapon. The question remains: What's the point?

By Rafi Letzter Published
If you live in Vermont and heard an explosion just before dinnertime Sunday (March 7), there's a good chance that was a shockwave from an incoming meteor exploding over the state.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Does the solar system really have a big, dark ninth planet drifting somewhere far beyond the orbit of Neptune? A new paper argues that Planet 9 is a statistical mirage.

By Rafi Letzter Published
The mystery at the heart of an unexplained, bright point of gamma-ray light in the sky has been solved: a violent, whirling redback.

By Rafi Letzter Published
It's a busy February for Mars, with three probes from three separate space agencies arriving at the red planet over the course of just nine days. Here's why.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Sea levels will probably rise faster than the most mainstream climate models predict, according to a new study.

By Rafi Letzter Published
In 2018, one of the brightest X-ray lights in the sky went dark, and scientists still aren't sure why.

By Rafi Letzter Published
It's now possible to send uncrackable quantum messages through thin air, and the people who figured out how to do it are getting ready to send the messages into space.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Ever ridden a teacup ride at a state fair? If so, you might have a small taste of life in a whirling, twirling sextuply-eclipsing sextuple star system.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Data from the now-destroyed Arecibo radio telescope has revealed a bizarre new type of hybrid venomous spider star.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb has reignited a debate about whether alien life can explain an object that visited the solar system in 2017 in a scathing new book.

By Rafi Letzter Published
A new study shows that due to pollution already released, Earth will eventually blow past Paris goals. But that doesn't mean all is lost.

By Rafi Letzter Published
If there are other intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, they are probably much closer than we are to the galactic center, and fairly young.

By Rafi Letzter Published
There's a giant asteroid somewhere out there in the solar system, and it hurled a big rock at Earth that left behind meteorites unlike any scientists had ever seen.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Astronomers hunting for radio signals from alien civilizations have reportedly detected an "intriguing signal" from the direction of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star system to the sun.

By Rafi Letzter Published
Did the creator of the universe leave a hidden message in the cosmos for intelligent life? If so, scientists have yet to find it. But at least one is still trying.
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