3I/ATLAS Chemistry: Reading the Nature Astronomy Deuterium Paper
On 24 April 2026, Nature Astronomy published the first direct chemical measurement of water from another planetary system. The paper, led by graduate student Luis E. Salazar Manzano and principal investigator Teresa Paneque-Carreño at the University of Michigan, reports that the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS contains at least thirty times more deuterated water than any comet […]
The Wow! Signal: A Space Mystery
On the night of August 15, 1977, a radio telescope in rural Ohio recorded 72 seconds of narrowband signal at 1420.4056 MHz, the resonant frequency of neutral hydrogen. Days later, astronomer Jerry R. Ehman circled the printout’s intensity sequence “6EQUJ5” in red ink and wrote a single word in the margin: “Wow!” Forty-nine years later, […]