This time-lapse photograph shows several Perseid meteors all pointing away from the same area of the sky: the radiant of the meteor shower. A few stray meteors that don’t point back to that same location can also be seen: non-Perseid...
The lunar horizon glow, shown here as imaged by the Clementine Spacecraft in the 1990s, had actually been seen numerous times during the Apollo mission, but its existence was treated as dubious until an explanation for the lunar atmosphere was...
This illustration of the dust-rich and comet-rich exoplanetary system, Epsilon Eridani, has a lot in common with our own Solar System’s first 500–600 million years of cosmic history. The question of what set the planets in motion around their star,...
This multicolored image of colliding galaxy cluster MACS J0416.1–2403 shows optical data from Hubble plus X-ray data (pink) from Chandra and gravitational lensing data (blue) all superimposed together. The effects of gravitational lensing are clearly visible in the distortion of...
This set of illustrations explains how a large black hole can form from the direct collapse of a massive cloud of gas within a couple of hundred million years after the Big Bang. Cold streams of gas can lead to...
This visualization of field lines shows a classical picture of fields, such as electric or magnetic fields. However, at the quantum level, there are fluctuations inherent in these fields, and while those fluctuations can be represented only as virtual (and...
This rotating spiral galaxy, NGC 1512, is located only 30 million light-years away, and is highlighted by a core of old stars, a central ring of hot, star-forming material, and then wispy, thin spiral arms connect it to a more...
In 2023, Fermilab’s Muon g-2 collaboration announced their latest results, which were consistent with previous experimental results but had only half of the error and uncertainty. The ball is now in the court of theorists to determine how significant the...
This overhead shot shows the start of the finals of the men’s 100 meter race during the Tokyo Olympics. Although Usain Bolt’s world record of 9.58 seconds has stood since 2009, it does not approach the limits of human possibility....
Time is normally something we measure with clocks: devices that record its passage from one moment to the next. While there is an interesting philosophical case to be made that time is an illusion, the fact that we can measure,...
