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...
The Milky Way, as seen at La Silla observatory, is a stunning, awe-inspiring sight to anyone, and offers a spectacular view of a great many stars in our galaxy. There are approximately 6000 stars visible to the naked human eye,...
If each time a quantum decision were made, our timeline split to allow for two (and only two) possible outcomes, then the number of overall possibilities would increase incredibly rapidly, depending on which combinations of outcomes and what order-of-interactions are...
This one prominent galaxy, known as the Big Wheel and located 22 billion light-years away at present, spans ~100,000 light-years in diameter: the largest disk galaxy known at these early cosmic epochs. The smaller galaxy to the Big Wheel’s upper...
By creating two entangled photons from a pre-existing system and separating them by great distances, we can ‘teleport’ information about the state of one by measuring the state of the other, even from extraordinarily different locations. Interpretations of quantum physics...
This image shows the core of globular cluster Terzan 5, just 22,000 light-years away in our own Milky Way, with a wide variety of colors and masses inherent to the stars within. With millions of stars within only a few...
This fun graphic illustrates the tension on Λ, Einstein’s cosmological constant, exerted by combining supernova data (right), baryon acoustic oscillations (left), and the cosmic microwave background (top). When all three data sets are combined, the idea of a cosmological constant...
