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 Published
Astronomers studying black hole SagA* have to deal with the weird, frustrating little star that lit up right between Earth and the black hole in 2013.

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

By Rafi Letzter Published
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.

By Rafi Letzter Published
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.

By Rafi Letzter Published
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.

By Rafi Letzter Published
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Rafi Letzter Published
This massively bright "star" is actually two stars.

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

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

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

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

By Rafi Letzter Published
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.

By Rafi Letzter Published
NASA's Opportunity Rover has died on Mars. Now what?

By Rafi Letzter Published
NASA has another mobile robot on Mars. Why not launch a rescue mission?

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

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