Here in our own Solar System, a single star anchors the system, where inner, rocky planets, an intermediate-distance asteroid belt, and then more distant gas giant planets eventually give way to the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. The sizes, masses,...
This image shows the expected signature of a Higgs boson decaying to bottom-quark jets around the collision point inside a muon collider. The yellow lines represent the decaying background of muons, while the red lines represent the b-quark jets. (Credit:...
This image shows the insides of a prototype Time Projection Chamber (TPC), one of the most essential tools for detecting recoils and collisions within very sensitive particle physics experiments. These are core technologies for experimental dark matter and neutrino detection...
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...
