Christopher has a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles. After eight years of searching for exoplanets, probing distant galaxies and exploring comets, Chris realized he enjoyed talking about astronomy a lot more than actually doing it. After being awarded a 2013 AAAS Mass Media Fellowship to write for Scientific American, he left a research career at the U.S. Naval Observatory to pursue a new life writing about anything and everything within the local cosmological horizon. Since 2014, he's been working with Science News.
Coronal mass ejections – CMEs for short – are powerful eruptions near the surface of the sun that ripple through our solar system and can interfere with satellites and power grids on Earth.
White dwarfs are dead stars. A single white dwarf contains roughly the mass of our sun in a volume no bigger than our planet. Our sun will become a white dwarf someday.
Maybe you associate the word ‘zodiac’ with astrology, but it has an honored place in astronomy, too. It’s defined by the annual path of the sun across our sky.
Why do professional astronomers speak of distances in the universe not in terms of light-years, but in terms of parsecs, a distance of 3.26 light-years? Explanation here.
Retrograde motion of Jupiter or Mars or Saturn in our sky is an illusion, caused by Earth’s passing these slower-moving outer worlds. But there’s a real retrograde motion, too.
Wolf-Rayet stars make our sun look tiny. They can be hundreds of times more massive, millions of times brighter, and tens of thousands of degrees hotter.