This image shows six diff erent, unrelated planetary nebulae, all with similar, bipolar morphologies. These six objects, NGC 6302, NGC 6881, NGC 5189, M2–9, Hen 3–1475, and Hubble 5, are all destined to fade away after around 20,000 years. (Credit:...
This image shows the dusty galaxy NGC 4526, the galaxy that famously hosted a bright supernova back in 1994. It has a central dust disk in the middle of the galaxy, and the fact that it appears dusty on one...
However, while most of the dwarf galaxies we know of are found as satellites around larger, more massive galaxies, they aren’t good laboratories for helping us understand the Universe as it was long ago. Back during the first few billion...
The pair of interacting galaxies in the process of a merger, known as IC 1623, is imaged here by JWST. Data from a trio of JWST’s instruments, MIRI, NIRSpec, and NIRCam, were used in the construction of this image. This...
This illustration shows Barnard’s star, with the correct size and temperature/color, as orbited by the four recently confirmed exoplanets around it. All four exoplanets are close in, with orbits ranging from 2.3 to 6.7 days, and small in mass: between...
Ernst Stuhlinger, seated at far left, was one of the early pioneers of NASA and of spaceflight missions in general in the United States. His idea for a Sun ship, powered by an ion drive that he codeveloped, is illustrated...
A tremendous revolution has occurred in the past four decades concerning our ultimate cosmic origins. While the Big Bang still plays an important role in the cosmic story, it is no longer considered to be the ultimate beginning or the...
This illustration shows how binary stars interact with a supermassive black hole to create a population of hypervelocity stars that wind up getting gravitationally kicked so strongly, they get ejected from their home galaxy. This process should be at play...
We normally conceive of our Universe as having emerged from a preceding period of cosmic inflation, with our Big Bang occurring where one region of inflating space ceased inflating and transitioned to being dominated by matter and radiation. However, in...
When the proper conditions are achieved, even multiple fermions, which normally cannot occupy the same quantum state, can reach a state known as a Fermionic condensate, where they all achieve the lowest-energy configuration possible. This is the seventh state of...
