The Universe is a vast, diverse, and interesting place, full of matter and energy, in various forms, playing out on the stage of spacetime, in accordance with the laws of physics. This is exemplified by this Hubble space telescope image...
The Milky Way and planet Jupiter shine brilliantly in this photo from the top of Mauna Kea. The yellow glow are the lights from the city of Hilo, located about 25 miles (40 km) away from the mountaintop summit. (Credit:...
The Flame Nebula, shown here in a combination of X-ray data (from Chandra) and infrared light (from Spitzer), showcases a young, massive star cluster at the center, which carves out a spectacular shape in the surrounding gaseous material that was...
The event horizon of a black hole is a spherical or spheroidal region from which nothing, not even light, can escape. But outside the event horizon, the black hole is predicted to emit radiation. Hawking’s 1974 work was the first...
This illustration of a human brain was generated by DALL-E, a generative AI program, in late 2023. Although it bears many superficial resemblances to a human brain, it lacks many of the brain’s defining structures and presents a fundamentally unrealistic...
The cover of Infinite Cosmos: Visions from the James Webb Space Telescope, is the first National Geographic book about JWST. The book first became available on October 8, 2024, and showcases the Cosmic Cliffs: one of the first 5 science...
A zoomed-in view of many galaxies as taken with ESO’s VISTA camera, with the galaxy identified as REBELS-25 shown blown up and with enhanced brightness. (Credit: ESO/J. Dunlop et al. Ack.: CASU, CALET; Modifications: E. Siegel)The earliest Milky Way-like galaxy,...
This image shows the first of ten relocatable 1.4 meter telescopes arranged in a Y, or three-pronged, configuration. Telescopes can be separated by as little as 7.8 meters for wide-field viewing, or as much as 340 meters for extremely high...
The most comprehensive view of the cosmic microwave background, which is the oldest light observable in the Universe, shows us a snapshot of what the cosmos was like just 380,000 years after the onset of the hot Big Bang. Over...
For the first ~3 billion years of cosmic history, the star-formation rate rose and rose until reaching a peak, but has fallen off significantly in the ~10–11 billion years since. Although an enormous number of photons have been cumulatively produced...
