Rafi Letzter

Astronomers watched a high-speed gas cloud slam into the atmosphere of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.

A team of undergraduate students at Drake University in Iowa is developing a magnetic shield to defend interplanetary astronauts from the intense cosmic radiation between Earth and Mars.

The international team responsible for the first-ever image of a black hole's shadow already has plans to take a better, more detailed image.

The huge team behind the Event Horizon Telescope already made news with their first image of a black hole. But they've got bigger ambitions.

Researchers have developed a new, unspeakably dangerous, and incredibly slow method of crossing the universe. It involves wormholes linking special black holes that probably don't exist.

Planetary scientists are calling on mineral physicists to help them figure out the strange chemistry going on inside super-Earths and mini-Neptunes.

Almost nothing in the black hole image surprised astrophysicists. These are the three biggest mysteries it left unsolved, and two questions it did answer.

Beresheet's moon crash was the first in nearly half a century. But back in the day, moon crashes happened all the time.

The ghostly 'quasiparticles' have barely any material existence, but physicists are still managing to manipulate them into uncanny shapes.

Lanthanum, diamond crushers and advanced computer models are changing the hunt for this extreme quantum mechanical effect.

NASA's TESS mission has, for the first time, detected a planet orbiting a star with visible starquakes.

Our world is full of chemicals that shouldn't exist. New research could explain why they exist anyway.

This massively bright "star" is actually two stars.

A particularly odd, spinning star has woken up, and it's spitting bright flashes of radio waves at us again.

Earth's vast magma oceans, roiling deep beneath our feet, seem to be pumping oxygen into the planet's liquid core.

Sometime in the last decade, something heavy slammed into the Martian atmosphere and blasted apart into a hard rain of superheated material.

Carbon dioxide emissions could wipe out one of Earth's most common types of clouds. That's bad news.

The quarks inside atoms move slower than the quarks inside free-floating protons and neutrons. But why?

This cluster of stars has been visible for a long time, but scientists only just now realized they're part of the same cosmic river.

NASA's Opportunity Rover has died on Mars. Now what?

NASA has another mobile robot on Mars. Why not launch a rescue mission?

Space is warm — or, at least, warmer than it should be. A new study seeks to explain why.

Scientists couldn't find the pattern in these strange clouds of quantum fireworks. So they enlisted a computer, and it noticed a hidden turtle.

The Australian-Antarctic Ridge was expected to have emerged with the Pacific to its East. The real story was a surprise to geologists.

The device, built to be portable enough for use in space, produces a beam of laser light that changes less over time than any other laser humanity has created.