Monica Young

As Sky & Telescope's News Editor, Monica commissions, writes, and edits news and feature articles on the latest in astronomy science and observing.

Monica won the American Astronomical Society's Solar Physics Division Popular Media Award for her November 2020 feature article "To Touch the Sun" on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe's record-breaking journey to study our nearest star.

Monica joined the Sky & Telescope staff in 2012 as web editor, with a primary mission of creating, maintaining, and updating website content. She guided the website through a major migration in 2014 and managed the overhaul of the site's interactive sky chart. She then helped guide the site through another migration and redesign in 2019.

Monica majored in Physics & Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh, with a second major in Journalism. She went on to enroll in the Ph.D. program at Boston University, where she studied how quasars — the supermassive black holes lurking in distant galaxies — accumulate matter. To do this, she amassed data for almost 800 quasars imaged by the XMM-Newton X-ray space telescope and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. She conducted part of her research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and graduated from Boston University in 2010 before taking a postdoc at The Pennsylvania State University.

Meanwhile, Monica spent her free time writing for the Association for Women in Science magazine, her blog, Stars and Spice: The Moving Universe, Penn State's media relations, and various other media outlets. Soon, what started as a hobby became her reason for getting up in the morning. So when an opportunity at Sky & Telescope arose, Monica was delighted to join the team.

When Monica's not editing, writing, or reading about astronomy, she keeps busy chasing after her three children.