Patricia Daukantas, Science Writer/Editor

04/23/2026

For my friends who live with ME/CFS or long covid.

A disease like chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME), can fundamentally change a person's life.

04/23/2026

All these wavelengths make up the sunlight you see every day.

This looks like a rainbow… but it’s actually the Sun broken into its ingredients 🌈☀️

This high-resolution spectrum shows sunlight spread out by wavelength, from about 400 to 700 nanometers. Each dark line you see is where specific elements in the Sun absorb light, leaving behind a kind of fingerprint.

The data come from observations with the Fourier Transform Spectrometer at NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory, turning sunlight into something we can read and study in detail.

📸 N.A. Sharp/KPNO/NOIRLab/NSO/NSF/AURA

04/23/2026

Congratulations to these scientists from my physics alma mater!!!!

03/27/2026

03/27/2026

With NOIRLab – I just made it onto their weekly engagement list by being one of their top engagers 🎉

03/27/2026

Fascinating!

Oof, awkward!

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope accidentally caught a breakup while studying C/2025 K1 (ATLAS). But this was a happy accident: The comet (not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS) happened to break apart during Hubble's observations, an extraordinarily rare opportunity. Researchers have wanted to study comet breakups with Hubble before, but had no way to schedule an unpredictable event.

03/16/2026

Happy 100th Birthday of liquid-fuel-powered rocket flight! Proud that this took place about 30 miles from where I was born (much later)!

Before humanity sent satellites, telescopes, humans and weapons into space, Robert Goddard experimented with the first liquid-fueled rocket on his aunt’s farm.

03/16/2026

🚨Astronomers have discovered the clearest example yet of a star chemically enriched by the first stars in the Universe!

This star, named PicII-503, resides in the tiny, ultra-faint dwarf galaxy Pictor II, which is more than ten billion years old. PicII-503 contains less iron than any other star ever measured in another galaxy, while also having an extreme overabundance of carbon.

Why is this so important? The first stars forged the Universe’s earliest heavy elements and dispersed them when they exploded. PicII-503 preserves that chemical imprint, making it the first unambiguous example of a second-generation star in an ultra-faint dwarf galaxy.

The discovery was enabled by the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the NSF Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope, at NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, a Program of NSF NOIRLab. The study was led by Anirudh Chiti, Brinson Prize Fellow at Stanford University, and the results are presented in a paper appearing in Nature Astronomy.

Read more: https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2607/
📷 CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA
Image processing: Image Processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF NOIRLab)
Acknowledgment: PI: Anirudh Chiti, Alex Drlica-Wagner

12/04/2025

Congratulations!

NASA has completed the construction of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope!

On November 25, 2025, technicians joined the inner and outer portions of the observatory in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

After final testing, Roman will move to the launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations in summer 2026. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026: https://go.nasa.gov/48EqnE8

12/04/2025

So exciting! I've watched other clean-room projects at Goddard in the past. Now I REALLY hope the telescope stays funded so it can launch!