Lisa Grossman

Lisa Grossman

Astronomy Writer

Lisa Grossman is the astronomy writer for Science News. Previously she was a news editor at New Scientist, where she ran the physical sciences section of the magazine for three years. Before that, she spent three years at New Scientist as a reporter, covering space, physics and astronomy. She has a degree in astronomy from Cornell University and a graduate certificate in science writing from UC Santa Cruz. Lisa was a finalist for the AGU David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, and received the Institute of Physics/Science and Technology Facilities Council physics writing award and the AAS Solar Physics Division Popular Writing Award. She interned at Science News in 2009-2010.

All Stories by Lisa Grossman

  1. An image of cosmic clouds glowing in X-rays.
    Astronomy

    200 years ago, the Milky Way’s central black hole briefly awoke

    The black hole is thought to be mostly quiet and dim. Now, glowing cosmic clouds have revealed the behemoth’s last flare.

  2. An image from the Hubble Space Telescope of globular star cluster M92.
    Astronomy

    A star cluster in the Milky Way appears to be as old as the universe

    Globular cluster M92 is about 13.8 billion years old, a new calculation suggests. Getting the age right could help resolve a bigger cosmic conundrum.

  3. an illustration of a galaxy with a quasar, shown as a a swirl of blue and pink with a beam bisecting the center against the starry backdrop of space
    Astronomy

    In a first, JWST detected starlight from distant galaxies with quasars

    Until JWST’s sharp infrared eyes came along, it wasn’t possible to see the galaxies hosting extremely bright supermassive black holes called quasars.

  4. An illustration of a supermassive black hole orbiting an even larger black hole with a field of stars in the background.
    Astronomy

    A supermassive black hole orbiting a bigger one revealed itself with a flash

    A supermassive black hole binary system has puzzled astronomers for decades. Now they’ve finally seen direct signals from the smaller of the two.

  5. A false-color image of a watery plume coming off Saturn's moon Enceladus.
    Planetary Science

    JWST captured Enceladus’ plume spraying water nearly 10,000 kilometers into space

    NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals the rate at which Saturn’s moon Enceladus spews water and where that water ends up.

  6. A snapshot of a collapsing star spewing jets, colored red and green, outward against the backdrop of space
    Astronomy

    A simulation of a dying star shows how it could create gravitational waves

    Massive jets and an expanding cocoon of debris from a collapsing star could be a source of never-before-seen ripples in spacetime.

  7. Mars' northern hemisphere, shown in false color that highlights lowlands near the north pole
    Planetary Science

    A quake on Mars showed its crust is thicker than Earth’s

    Seismic data from NASA’s Insight lander reveal the crust is roughly 50 kilometers thick, with the northern crust being thinner than the south’s.

  8. An illustration of a reddish planet with swirling patterns depicting its radiation field
    Astronomy

    The first radiation belt outside the solar system has been spotted

    Encircling a Jupiter-sized body about 18 light-years from Earth, the radiation belt is 10 million times as bright as the ones around Jupiter.

  9. An image showing a black hole with a red ring surrounding it and going horizontally across the front.
    Physics

    Black holes resolve paradoxes by destroying quantum states

    A classic quantum experiment done near a black hole would create a paradox, physicists report. But not if the black hole collapses quantum states.

  10. An illustration of the Milky Way with two bubbles shown in blue and purple coming from the center of the galaxy.
    Astronomy

    Cosmic antimatter hints at origins of huge bubbles in our galaxy’s center

    An excess of positrons in Earth’s vicinity supports the idea that the Fermi bubbles were burped by the Milky Way’s supermassive black hole long ago.

  11. A telescope image of a long stream of cold cosmic gas seen as a blue line coming off a big purple circle on a dark background.
    Astronomy

    A stream of cold gas is unexpectedly feeding the far-off Anthill Galaxy

    The finding suggests that early galaxies might have gained more of their bulk from streams of cold gas instead of in violent galaxy collisions.

  12. illustration of two merging neutron stars in blue
    Astronomy

    A neutron star collision may have emitted a fast radio burst

    Astronomers spotted both a fast radio burst and gravitational waves from a cosmic smashup in the same part of the sky and at about the same time.