During cosmological inflation, the space contained in the inflationary region grows exponentially, doubling in all three dimensions with each tiny fraction-of-a-second that passes. Where inflation ends, a hot Big Bang ensues. But due to quantum effects, each region where a...
If you held a dime up from a distance of 160 feet (50 meters) away, it would take up more area on the sky than this section of the original Hubble Deep Field image. Several hundred galaxies are visible here,...
The SARS virus (orange) has a crown-like structure, meaning that it’s part of the coronavirus family of diseases. The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, also known as the virus which causes COVID-19 in humans, is the largest, most lethal and long-term detrimental...
From the main mine that humans made in the Oklo region, one of the natural reactors is accessible via an offshoot, as illustrated here. The large uranium deposit present underwent nuclear fission on and off for hundreds of thousands of...
Around galaxy UGC 00180, a great stellar halo consisting of approximately four billion stars’ worth of matter can be discovered by optimizing this telescopic image for low surface-brightness features. It turns out that a great many galaxies, maybe even all...
Many have already claimed that cosmology is in crisis, and that the Big Bang, and our entire ΛCDM paradigm, has unsound foundations. But the consensus picture not only isn’t so easy to overthrow, but the “crisis” aspect is often greatly...
From their earliest beginnings to their final extent before fading away, Sun-like stars will grow from their present size to the size of a red giant (~the Earth’s orbit) to up to ~5 light-years in diameter, typically. The largest known...
Believe it or not, we’ve actually caught a few exoplanets doing exactly this, and we’ve got the JWST spectra in hand for one of them now, teaching us, for the first time, what a planetary interior is made of outside...
These two projections show the primordial sky in microwave light as seen by ESA’s Planck mission. At left, a hemispherical projection (encapsulating half of the sky) is shown; at right, a Mollweide projection (encapsulating the full sky) is shown. (Credit:...
These aren’t a pair of eyes gazing at us from the depths of space, but rather a pair of interacting spiral galaxies that are forming stars at enhanced rates due to their mutual gravitational pulls on one another. This image...
