Stories by Lee Billings

The James Webb Space Telescope is giving us our first glimpse of stars in the early universe.

Some of the most violent cosmic collisions occur silently in the vacuum of space, but with the right instrumental ears, we can still hear it happen. Here’s how.

New work suggests four distinct star system types—and finds our own in the rarest category

Two SciAm editors duke it out to see if wormholes and multiverses could in fact exist.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) and Europa Clipper missions will search for signs of habitability on three of Jupiter’s potentially ocean-bearing moons.

Our first known interstellar visitor is now long gone, but new research has some ideas about why it moved the way it did while it was in our cosmic neighborhood.

In the inaugural episode of Cosmos, Quickly, we blast off with Lt. Gen. Nina Armagno of the Space Force, who is charged with protecting our space in space, particularly from Russia and China.

We slammed a $330-million spaceship the size of a dairy cow into an asteroid the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Here’s what we’re learning about how our first step in planetary defense could save us in the future.

Quantum telepathy, laser-based time crystals, a glow from empty space and an “unreal” universe—these are the most awesome (and awfully hard to understand) results from the subatomic realm we encountered in 2022

Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work using entangled photons to test the quantum foundations of reality

Remembering Frank Drake, who led science in listening for an extraterrestrial “whisper we can’t quite hear”

Long considered trivial, the effects of rocket launches and reentering space debris on global warming and ozone loss could soon become too large to ignore

Breathtaking pictures that include the deepest-ever infrared view of ancient galaxies offer a preview of the spectacular science in store for the most powerful space observatory in history

Decades of work, $10 billion in spending and nearly 14 billion years of cosmic history have brought us to this moment: the first science from the largest and most powerful observatory ever built.

Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations project scientist, discusses how NASA plans to wring as much science as possible from the $10-billion observatory

Check out the weird and wonderful stories that delighted us this year

A major report outlining the highest priorities and recommendations for U.S. astronomy has finally been released, revealing the shape of things to come

One study suggests the Curiosity rover’s landing site is not as it seems

Half the award goes to Giorgio Parisi for his studies of disorder and chaos. The remainder is shared between Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann for modeling global warming and climate variability

A battle for the future of American stargazing is about to begin—and the stakes are sky high

Scientists and engineers react with elation to the historic interplanetary flight

The author of a new book reveals the hidden human history of NASA’s in-development Europa Clipper mission

Jessica Watkins is excited for humans to get to work on the lunar surface

Last week’s pinpoint touchdown of NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover in Jezero Crater was historic for many reasons, chief among them the epochal nature of the mission’s task of seeking signs of ancient life—and caching relevant samples for eventual return to Earth. But even if the rover finds no evidence of Martian microbes during its operations, it will have still produced another spectacular “first” for the textbooks, which NASA officials unveiled today: An unprecedented look at the “seven minutes of terror” between Perseverance’s fiery plunge through the planet’s skies and its coming to rest on solid ground far below. This is the first ever high-definition video of atmospheric entry, descent and landing on another world.

Perseverance’s predecessor Curiosity recorded snippets of the final stages of its Mars landing in 2012 that resulted in a short stop-motion video, and in 2005 the Cassini mission’s Huygens lander beamed back images and telemetry data from its chilly descent to Saturn’s moon Titan that were later used to construct remarkable visualizations. And there is, of course, no shortage of lunar landing footage from the Apollo missions of yore. But never before has a spacecraft captured the entire sequence of an otherworldly landing in such lush detail. More than mere eye candy, this data could prove crucial for the design of future, more ambitious voyages to the Red Planet’s surface, which is considered to be one of the solar system’s most technically challenging landing destinations.

Here is NASA's livestream on the footage.

Video credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech