When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai volcano blew its top in 2022, it wasn’t just one of the most powerful eruptions in modern history—it literally made waves in space. The explosion sent a towering plume of ash and gas over 31 miles (50 kilometers) into the atmosphere, punching far above where commercial jets cruise and most […]
NASA Wants to Track Earth’s Gravity With a Cloud of Floating Atoms in Space
Buckle up, nerds: NASA is building the first quantum gravity sensor for space—a suitcase-sized instrument that could soon be measuring everything from subterranean water to hidden reserves of petroleum, all by watching how clouds of atoms act under the force of gravity. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), along with several partners, are developing the […]
LISA: What the Revolutionary Gravitational Wave Observatory Will Actually See
LISA, a $1.6 billion gravitational wave observatory set to launch next decade, will revolutionize the way we see gravitational waves—the infinitesimal perturbations of spacetime first predicted over a century ago and only detected eight years ago. In the fall, we published a deep-dive into LISA’s design and the engineering hurdles that must be overcome to […]