Traditionally, atoms are viewed as dense nuclei, a mix of protons and neutrons, surrounded by electrons that move in specific orbital paths. This picture is useful in some circumstances, but the full suite of quantum information encoded in an atom...
Our Universe, from the hot Big Bang until the present day, underwent a huge amount of growth and evolution, and continues to do so. Our entire observable Universe was approximately the size of a modest boulder some 13.8 billion years...
This view of galaxy IC 1101 in size the galaxy cluster Abell 2029 is deceptive: this isn’t a single, normal galaxy orbited by a slew of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters, but rather the largest giant elliptical galaxy known, alongside...
This illustration of our Milky Way shows an ancient galactic stream wrapped around our galaxy’s plane at nearly a 90 degree angle: evidence for a recent and even ongoing merger in our galaxy’s history. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech))Even with just...
The simulated decay of a black hole not only results in the emission of radiation, but the decay of the central orbiting mass that keeps most objects stable. Black holes are not static objects, but rather change over time. Black...
Observation of the red supergiant star, Betelgeuse, revealed a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. In 2019–2020, a great plume of material erupted from Betelgeuse. A recent...
When B-mesons decay, they often decay to either two pions, two kaons, or a kaon and a pion. The fact that strangeness-conserving and strangeness-changing decays don’t lead to mutually consistent parameters may be a major hint that could point towards...
Unlike the picture that Newton had of instantaneous forces along the line-of-sight connecting any two masses, Einstein conceived gravity as a warped spacetime fabric, where the individual particles moved through that curved space according to the predictions of General Relativity....
The Sombrero galaxy, commonly viewed in optical light (as shown at bottom, via Hubble), displays a vastly different set of featured in mid-infrared light (by JWST, top). At last, we’ve seen beneath the Sombrero’s hat, and can paint a coherent...
Each s orbital (red), each of the p orbitals (yellow), the d orbitals (blue) and the f orbitals (green) can contain only two electrons apiece: one spin up and one spin down in each one. The effects of spin, of...
